Asterisk Featured Article

Digium (News - Alert), the creator and primary developer of Asterisk open source telephony software, announced a new training course — Asterisk Fast Start — that is designed to serve as an entry-level course providing an introduction to Asterisk (News - Alert), telephony and the Linux environment.

 

According to the company, the goal is to make Asterisk open source telephony software more accessible than ever before, by providing a basic level of knowledge to all course participants.

 

The training will consist of an introduction to Asterisk covering such topics as installation, configuration and the basic operation of Asterisk, and will take students through all the steps from a freshly installed Linux computer to a fully configured and working Asterisk implementation. The course is designed in such a way that participants do not need any previous Linux, telephony or Asterisk experience to partake.

 

According to the Fast Start Web site, the goal of the course is to enable participants to:

·         Install and run Asterisk on any computer;

·         Configure Asterisk to deliver basic PBX (News - Alert) functionality such as basic call routing, voicemail and directory services;

·         List the functionality associated with a traditional PBX

·         Explain the background to Asterisk in terms of the history of Digium and the Open Source community of which it is a part

·         Define the operating system environments in which Asterisk is developed and supported

·         Describe the telephony connections which Asterisk supports and identify the Digium hardware needed to effect this connectivity

·         Identify the basic characteristics of analog and digital PSTN connections and how VoIP compares and contrasts with these

·         Install and run Asterisk from the packages available for download from www.asterisk.org

 

According to Digium director of services, Rod Montgomery, “We are pleased to offer an intensive, introductory overview to Asterisk – the most widely used open source telephony project. This new course complements our current training offerings that are geared toward every level of expertise.”

 

The Asterisk Fast Start course is a three-day course consisting of lectures and lab exercises. The labs will be presented in a workbook which the student gets to keep. The lecture notes and sample configurations will also be included.

 

·         Participants receive the following for the course:

·         Digium TDM411B Analog card (1 FXO port + 1 FXS port)

·         Digium TE122P T1/E1/J1 card

·         Polycom (News - Alert) SoundPoint IP 330 SIP Phone

·         Training Courseware

·         Asterisk: The Future of Telephony — O’Reilly (2nd Edition)

·         Asterisk T-shirt

·         Calculator, Mouse Pad, and Orange Ice Digium Pen

 

“We’ve asked David Duffett of TeleSpeak, Ltd., an Authorized Training Partner in the United Kingdom, to create Asterisk Fast Start in response to requests from the Asterisk community for an introductory offering,” added Montgomery.

 

Asterisk Fast Start will kick off with its first course on Oct. 13, offered by David Duffett in Oxford, England.

 

In addition to this newest course offering, Digium offers the following courses addressing varying levels of expertise:

 

·         Asterisk 101

·         Asterisk Advanced

·         Asterisk Bootcamp

·         Asterisk SIP Master

·         Open Telephony Training Seminar

·         Digium-Certified Asterisk Professional (dCAP)

 

To learn more about Digium Asterisk Fast Start or any of Digium’s offered courses, please visit the company’s Web site.