After 18 months of development，AskoziaPBX 2.0 has now been released to the open source community. It’s an important milestone for this project and also for the small and embedded open source PBX community.
So, what have we been up to in all that time?
Porting to Linux
The 1.0 series of Askozia®PBX started as a fork of m0n0wall®, a firewall project based on FreeBSD. Our first step in creating 2.0 was to move the project to Linux.
We forked the T2 Linux distribution and tailored it to the project's needs. T2's build system is amazing. It provides us the ability to produce images for a whole range of CPU architectures and system types. The entire porting process was sponsored by Auerswald, a German telecommunication equipment manufacturer. They are also now running AskoziaPBX on some of their offerings!
It "Just Works"
Once we were running on Linux, the deep rewrites began. A lightweight GUI and validation framework was added and many pages completely rewritten. The entire WebGUI was audited for clarity, simplicity and logical defaults. Also, any task which could be automated.
The project focuses on making the complex world of telephony understandable. Consumers will be able to use this, not just techies familiar with the jargon.
Flexibility
With the revision work complete, one issue had to be addressed: flexibility. As popular and stable as the 1.0 series has been, this complaint kept coming up. In 2.0, experienced users can now manually edit files and have their changes rolled into the unified XML configuration file (i.e. changes survive in backup/restore/restart/upgrade procedures).
We call this new interface the "Integrator Panel." It is an AJAX based overlay in the WebGUI and can be accessed anywhere by simply pressing the 'ESC' key.
New Features
After all of that was complete, the new features started finding their way in as testing continued. Here are some of the highlights:
Blackfin CPU architecture support
Moved from Asterisk® 1.4 to 1.6.1
Auto-detection and configuration of Analog and ISDN ports
Improved regional analog compatibility options
Provider port groups
Multiple provider failover support
Many new countries indication tones supported
Remote configuration of Redfone gateways
Storage Disk interface and storage services
Media Manager to install additional voice prompt packages
ssh and sftp support
Rework of Dialplan Applications: PHP, syntax highlighting, Flite text-to-speech engine (beta)
Skinny Phone support (beta)
For the full list of changes, please visit the changelog.
Periphery
Not only has the "product" of AskoziaPBX moved forward but everything around it has been gathering steam. There are now more than 10 committers. The forums are growing at an impressive rate each month. Downloads are already over 20,000 for 2010. Our shop is getting new products soon and a complete redesign. Also, starting today, all appliances there will be sold running 2.0.
We're also working with two new manufacturers to get their appliances running AskoziaPBX. To see the project's success translate into commercial interest is great. It confirms that Asterisk can be made attractive and useful for the everyday consumer.
About AskoziaPBX:
Askozia®PBX is a complete telephone system. It can speak to nearly any telephony technology in the world and is configured via a highly intuitive WebGUI. Designed to run on low-resource systems, this is embedded Asterisk® 1.6.1.
In less than 15MB we've packed: our Linux distribution, our multilingual WebGUI, multilingual language prompts, music-on-hold, conferencing and voicemail.
About Michael Iedema
Michael Iedema is an American Computer Science major who finished up his degree in Germany and ended up staying for the beer and sausages. Currently, he is the head of development for Askozia®PBX.
About the AskoziaPBX Appliance:
There are three different configurations of the AskoziaPBX and work perfectly with OpenVox Mini PCI cards: Deciso AskoziaPBX IP, Deciso AskoziaPBX IP and Analog and Deciso AskoziaPBX IP and ISDN.
For the original news, please visit HERE.