Asterisk and xAP

[Patrick Lidstone \(Personal E-mail\)]

I don't suppose this will be of huge interest to the masses, but I
thought I'd make a post anyway...

My love affair with the opensource pbx, asterisk (www.asteriskpbx.org)
continues! I've pretty much completely xAP-enabled asterisk, and the end
results are terrific! Some of the features I've got up and running:

- Incoming calls are broadcast according to xAP callerid spec (and
picked up by various other display devices of course), with lookup
against a phonebook exported from asterisk

- Incoming calls can be flagged as belonging to a particular group, and
this info is included in the caller id message, so priority can be given
to different sets of callers (family, friends etc). Asterisk also uses
this info to forward specific callers to my mobile / give certain
callers extra voice menu options (although that functionality is nothing
to do with xAP specifically).

- Full IVR integration with xAP-cache and speech synthesiser so the last
value of any xAP message can be read out to a caller. This is great for
comfort-style home control menus - asterisk knows it's me when I call
from the caller id info, and can read out security system status,
weather info, heating status/control, items on the barcode shopping list
etc. These menus can be accessed internally too using short codes (*5
etc).

- Integration with outlook via xAP. This is a killer app for me -
something I've wanted to do for literally years, but could never manage
with a low-end analogue PBX. At long last I can look up an outlook
contact, click a dial button (which sends a xAP message to asterisk) and
then have asterisk set up the call from my extension without me having
to dial anything. Hoorah!

- Web based phone log - again driven by xAP-cache. Lists both incoming
and outgoing calls, with contact details/name/date etc, which is nice
for redialling or emailing a reply to someone you missed a call from -
just point and click. Will probably build on this over time to move
towards a mini-CRM system.

Awesome stuff, thanks to asterisk. Well I think so, anyway :-) If
there's enough interest, I can write this all up in due course and put
on the website - but I'm guessing it's pretty niche.

Patrick