Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Design a Virtual Office with Open Source?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-would-you-do-it dept.

apropos asks: "An interesting question came up recently when discussing (yet again) starting an open-source based consulting company: 'How would you design the ultimate virtual office with open source software?' With things like fax, VoIP, web, email, security and office suites all available as open source products, what kind of useful things could be done? One idea that came to mind was emailing answering machine recordings. What would you put into your ultimate virtual office solution?"

4 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. What about Asterisk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can use Asterisk for your PBX.

    1. Re:What about Asterisk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Uhh you don't need any extra hardware over what you would need for an *H323 solution. You can use software-based phones if you have nothing else. You can get a SIP phone for $65 if you are on a serious budget and want the feel of a phone in your hand when you talk. You'll never find a phone that is compatible with *H323 for that low.

      I have less than $300 and have three internal extensions and one external line. A comparable pbx would be much more expensive and MUCH less flexible. I've been able to do with Asterisk in about 30 minutes what would have taken months of C programming on any decent PBX (and a $10k developer license).

    2. Re:What about Asterisk by Gunfighter · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, I offer Asterisk for _exactly_ this application. It's more or less a 'follow me' service so that you can work from wherever you want and have your extension forwarded to wherever you want. Once the workday is over, just turn off the forwarding and let everything roll to voicemail. The great thing with this is that you can then set the extensions however you want them: hunt groups, call center queue, etc. etc. You can even park the call and then contact a co-worker (we use Jabber) to dial into the system and pick up the parked call from wherever he or she may be at the time. From the caller's perspective, it's almost like they were transferred directly to the person down the hall from you. A little re-configuration and you have a conference call server... fire up some XML-RPC to your backend database and you have an IVR system... the list goes on and on.

      Asterisk is much more flexible than working everything directly through the phone company, and can save a bundle on not having to pay for extra features at the Central Office level. After all, in some areas a channelized T1 with 24 trunks (think 12 in & 12 out) is cheaper than twelve centrex lines with all of the features. When you compare this over the long run, this savings, coupled with the lower hardware costs, can make a full featured phone system ROI _very_ quickly for the virtual office environment.

      (Hints: Ask your phone company to let you colo the box so you don't have to pay the local loop charge for the T1. Also be sure to ask what it would cost to go ahead and split two of the 64k channels out for Internet access so you can administer it remotely without having to use a modem.)

      --
      -- Stu

      /. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
  2. email voice messages - linux by 4pksings · · Score: 5, Informative

    VOCP does this. Multiple mailboxes, faxes, faxback,
    downloads messages via the web so that they can be played anywhere. Uses perl and python.

    Works very well, I have used it for over 3 years.

    And of course, it's GPL licensed, and downloadable at vocp.sourceforge.net.

    PK