Chapman - FreePBX 2.5 Powerful Telephony Solutions

Alex Robar is a strong supporter of Open Source Software and has worked in the IT industry for seven years. He has worked with Digium's Asterisk software since version 1.2, and typically uses Asterisk to replace existing closed source PBX systems for SMBs. As the Technical Services Manager for GearyTech (a Canadian Managed Services Provider), he develops IT automation solutions for SMBs. He has worked with open source telephony solutions for the past four years, and has collaborated on the development and growth of an international Asterisk-based VoIP peering network.

In 2005, Alex co-authored Secure Your E-mail Server on IBM eServer i5 with Linux , an IBM Redpaper on using OSS solutions on the iSeries server platform to create an integrated security appliance for a small business. Alex has also authored several freely available short tutorials for Asterisk and FreePBX.

I would like to thank my parents for always supporting my inner geek, no matter what, my sister Amanda for always giving me her time even when I was unable to give her mine, and my fiance Eveline who has always pushed her own interests aside to help support mine when I needed it.

I would also like to thank Leena Purkait and Darshana Shinde of Packt Publishing for keeping me on track throughout this entire process, and helping me solve whatever difficulties I had.

Justin Zimmer has worked in the contact center technology field for over ten years. During that time he has performed extensive software and computer telephony integrations using both PSTN and IP telephony. His current projects include system designs utilizing open source soft switches over more traditional proprietary hardware based telephony, and the integration of these technologies into market specific CRM products.

As CTO of Unicore Technologies out of Phoenix, AZ, Justin is developing hosted contact center solutions for the low-end market. Unicore's solutions present contact centers with low startup costs in a turbulent economy, and allows those centers to scale their business while maintaining a consistent and familiar user interface.

Justin has worked on countless software user manuals and instructional guides for both internal and customer usage.

He also worked on the Hopewell Blogs: a science fiction adventure novel that will be released chapter by chapter online and available in print once the final chapter has been released.

I'd like to thank the countless community contributors that have provided enough online documentation to make this book as accurate and helpful as possible. And I'd like to thank my wife Nicole for putting up with the extra hours spent reviewing this book, as well as my boys Micah and Caden and my daughter Keira for giving up some of their daddy-time for this project.

FreePBX 2.5 Powerful Telephony Solutions was written to help system administrators build, configure, and maintain an enterprise class PBX using the Asterisk and FreePBX open source software packages. This book covers the complete process of going from a bare metal server to a completely configured PBX with extensions, voicemail, least cost routing, digital receptionists, and dozens of other features.

Each chapter of the book discusses a specific feature set of FreePBX. The chapters contain step-by-step set up instructions for configuring each feature alongside screenshots of the FreePBX interface. Chapters that cover the installation of Asterisk and FreePBX as well as securing the PBX once it is built, are also included.