Asterisk ACD

With Asterisk you can build a powerful ACD for the cost of the server hardware and phones.

Step 1: Select Your Telephony Hardware

Asterisk applications that connect with legacy telephony systems (PBXs or the PSTN) require telephony interface hardware. Small system generally use analog or ISDN BRI connections. Larger systems (more than 12 lines) frequently use T1, E1 or J1 digital connections. If you're new to telephony, check out the Asterisk telephony by clicking the "More" link below.

Step 2: Select Your Computer Hardware

Asterisk can run on virtually any modern computer, but when building a production telephony application server you should follow a few basic best-practice guidelines. Click the "More" link below to learn the basic requirements for a solid Asterisk server.

Step 3: Install Linux & Asterisk

Once you have your Asterisk hardware the next step is software. You will either need to install Linux or use a ready-to-run distribution to install Linux, Asterisk and various related software packages. Since these application tutorials are intended to help you create custom telephony applications we will start with a generic installation of CentOS 5.3 and then install Asterisk from the Yum repository. This make it relatively easy to keep Asterisk up to date and avoids the complexities of hand compiling the Asterisk source code.

Step 4: Configure Connections

Now that Asterisk is installed and running you need to edit the system configuration files to implement connections to VoIP and PSTN services. Since this step is common to all applications (Asterisk doesn't do much good if it is not connected to anything) it contains information on creating both service connections (connections to VoIP or PSTN services) and endpoint connections (connections to phones or terminal adapters). Some applications require both service and endpoint connections (PBX, ACD) while others may require only service connections.