Run your own Home/SOHO PBX with AsteriskNOW

The second beta of AsteriskNOW was released yesterday and I just now got a chance to download and try it out. I have to say, this "beta" product looks and feels better than many commercial suites that I've tested and is definitely worth a look if you are looking for a PBX system for your home (perhaps to compliment a VoIP phone line) or office.

About 18 months ago the company I work for decided that it was time to move from having a few (4, to be exact, not counting the fax) analog phone lines to using a PBX system. At the time we did some research and eventually decided that a system that would allow us to use a mix of analog and VoIP lines was what we were looking for. Not wanting to be locked into a single hardware vendor, we decided to go with a system based on the open-source Asterisk software, specifically [email protected] (now Trixbox).

As can be gathered from the name, it was not terribly suited to business use and both systems we deployed were retired within a few months and replaced with a system from SwitchVox. While that system has a few bugs, all in all, it's a very stable platform. It's also not free (solutions start at $1000 and move up rapidly) which can be a real turn-off for a home or small office user. That's where AsteriskNOW comes in.

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