general overview of VoIP architecture

Can anyone provide a website (preferrably) or a book that gives an overview of VoIP architecture? I'm trying to figure out how to propose a solution of VoIP within an organization that currently uses an old Siemens PBX. Answers I'm looking for are regarding the ability for certain info from the server network to be displayed on a user's PC screen when a call is transferred from an external call center to an internal user and I figured the only way to do that is to install an VoIP system that interfaces the old PBX with a new IP PBX. How logical does that sound? They also want predictive dialing and IVR. (Those features aren't restricted to VoIP though but if a VoIP system provides them too that would be good.) Any thoughts, comments, suggestion, or further questions are welcomed.

Brandon

Reply to
Brandon McCombs
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There are a number of good Voip books from Cisco Press. Unfortunately, they are geared toward Cisco equipment (which may be okay for you, I don't know). Also, you might want to check out Chapter 1 of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. It is published by O'Reilly and was available from them in PDF format for free. I cannot locate it in PDF format at the moment though on their web site.

You can interface Asterisk (one Voip system) with legacy PBXes; however, I have not done it so I cannot speak to that. Asterisk can definitely do IVR and I would imagine someone has it doing predictive dialing. Google is your friend.

Jonathan

Reply to
Jonathan Roberts

I've been using Google and today I used Google Groups to see if I could come up with anything else. I resorted to using newsgroups because I couldn't find anything useful on the web regarding how to interface a VoIP system with a legacy PBX and whether I needed to in order to accomplish some of the capabilities we want to implement (or whether VoIP was needed at all for what we want). I'll try to find the books you mentioned and see if they help.

thanks

Reply to
Brandon McCombs

Actually, you don't even need VoIP for what you are trying to do. Well, unless you definitely want to use IP trunks for whatever reason. All else you can do with a good digital phone system that has a computer interface, preferably standard such as TAPI, and can be hooked up to your IP network as just a node, not necessarily a VoIP device. Take a look at Avaya IP Office that has TAPI feature built in and free and also comes with software that shows you status of extensions and can do plenty other things based on ANI of the caller or DID or other parameters.

Reply to
Dmitri(Cabling-Design.com

Launch eMule and download all PDFs that have VoIP in their title. There a few good ones. I don't know if you'll find your answer on whether you really need to keep using a legacy PBX and how to do this, but it doesn't hurt.

Reply to
Vincent Delporte

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