Asterisk for big implementations

Why not? Asterisk is very good at playing soothing music to your angry customers while they are on hold -- or, perhaps, a reminder that if they curse at your employees they will be hung-up on.

It can also, if desirable, actually connect these angry incoming calls to analog or VoIP phones for your customer service representatives. It includes an agent/queue system designed for scenarios just like yours.

....or you could MeetMe(1234) all of them.

(I thought of that in a sarcastic sense at first but now I'm beginning to warm to the idea. I'd like to try it on a helpline someday.)

--kyler

Dear both, your answer are really ilarious, but can you please explain in more details ?

My boss is trying to put me on this project so if you are right, please hnd me some tangible facts about it !

Piero

To learn more about Asterisk, you'd be well-served by reading as much as you can stand of the voip-info wiki,

Asterisk can definitely do what you're asking. 30 users is not very many. You can support that many with a single E1 interface and a channel bank if you have analog phones -- or with a single 100Mbit Ethernet interface and a switch if you have SIP phones.

However, the configuration for your business is going to be different from that for any other business. Asterisk is not a plug-and-play system -- a PBX can't be; it has to be customized. You'll need to choose hardware to support the technologies you need -- if you have DIDs (incoming phone calls) on an E1 line, you need an E1 card, for instance. This is a job for a full-time employee who will learn the system inside and out, or for a consultant who already knows it.

What's your background? If you're a telecom guy, using Asterisk will mean learning things like running a Linux server, building packages from source, and configuring a PC server box with telecom hardware. If you're a Linux guy (like me), using Asterisk will mean learning the things that the telecom guys take for granted.

I am the project manager, other engineers will work actively on it,

but the customer could work actively on.... me !