After watching the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, I watched and thought how awsome and perfect everything was….that is until I realized they used Windows to run the show…Microsoft Rules!

Designer BulletProof Clothing

Remember when ripping to Mp3 was a science that took a few steps to complete?  Remember having to go to cddb.com to get the artist and song info?  Back then having the album art was not even an option unless you did all the work yourself (scanning, cropping, and importing).  Well even today, now that we have been spoiled with the likes of Itunes, Winamp and yes even Windows Media Player, getting album art can sometimes be a challenge (especially if you don’t use one of the above players).  Well I have found the solution to problem of album art www.allcdcovers.com and it also has most DVD covers.  I plan on spending some free time on this site this weekend getting my obscure albums their art.

This is the beginning to a series of posts that deal with my and CCV’s experience with Asterisk.

The first thing I will tell you is document everything you do from the beginning. This is one area I will focus more closely on when I rebuild during the 1.6 installation later this year. I cannot tell you how important this is. It has been four months since I have sat down with Asterisk and spent time on the server (it has been running that well).

The next thing is document your old PBX well. Luckily I had Jon to help me with that. He took the time and mapped out what our current setup was, from extensions to dialplan to DID’s registered. It is a help to have someone very attention to detail in this type of project ( I saw the big picture and knew the ultimate goals but Jon kept me on daily task).

The last thing to getting started on implementation is be ready for anything. The night of cut-over I was nervous (even though our team of 12 was on Asterisk full-time for the last 2 months) and there was nothing that could help except a smooth clean cut-over. Thankfully the team all pitched in and everyone was supportive; we finished in 5 hours and had a new phone system the next morning that has run for the past 4 months better than I could have imagined (Amen!).

Next Up…Configuration issues

A few of my fellow team members have blogs and for some reason I have decided to link to them…go figure!

Jon Edmiston

Jon is the Director of IT and Communications at CCV and is by far the best and most dedicated Blogger I have met. Please check out his Blog for everything technology and TOI (things of interest). Also this guy knows how to lead!

David Turner

David is the Sr. App Developer at CCV and biy does he know his “stuff” ( I actually have NO idea what the definition of “stuff” is when referring to David (I am not a programmer)) He is a smart guy! Check out his Blog for Arena related posts and I am going out on a limb here maybe a personal post someday.

Jeff Schinella

Jeff is CCV’s Web Guy. He is brilliant when it comes to design and coding for the web. I don’t want to sell him short…He also has a great mind for marketing a product or campaign. Jeff is also one of the nicest guys I have ever met ( I know that sounds corny but if you have met him you know). Read his blog even though he may not update often (Come-on Jeff!)

Cameron Smith

Cameron is the Graphic Designer for CCV Main Service and most other things. He is what I like to call the “Everything Photoshop Guy”. He is very talented in all things design and also has a hand for marketing. By the way did I mention he is a photographer and good one at that. Read his Blog!

Michael Gray

Michael is the Marketing Coordinator at CCV and is a great guy. He is also extremely smart and easy to get along with. He is a new father and well deservingly so! (way to go Mike) He is a great asset to the Team and I count him as one of my good friends…Come-on People Read His Blog!

I know it sounds like I am bragging about the team I am a part of, but in reality they are all really better than I describe. God has really blessed me to be a part of such a talented group. Thanks for making this easy Guys!

This looks awesome. I cannot wait to play this and be further removed from reality!

Asterisk 1.6 is almost ready for release out of beta and there are a bunch of new features coming with its release. One of these is adaptive capabilities when dealing with and ODBC or MySQL backend. Right now with version 1.4 if you are running Asterisk realtime (which we are) the database fields need to matchup exactly for the system to function. Now with version 1.6 Asterisk will allow different database field mappings and will also allow database Inserts and Updates where fields do not exist. This is especially helpful with CDR tables in Asterisk. Right now Asterisk pushes out a bunch of data for CDR to a backend database and now with the ability to adapt Asterisk will add these fields into the tables without breaking Asterisk (which is what happens with version 1.4) Here is a link to the post describing it in more detail.

I am really impressed at how dedicated the Asterisk community is to improving and upgrading their product. This just reinforces how pleased I am that we went with Asterisk.

That is right…Yahoo! has left Microsoft’s offer and has turned to an offer from no other than Google. You can view the article here. Looks like Zimbra ( a Yahoo! product) will be in good hands after all. Very Interesting…I will be following this.

I have to give it to the Celtics coming back from 24 down to tie it in the 4th…win or lose, Well Done Celts.

Has it been that long already? Now that we have the new phone system it feels like it has always been there. It is hard to explain but Asterisk has made everyone’s job easier. Over the next few days I will explain in series how Asterisk has changed how our department and our church uses this new phone system. It might actually want to make you change the way you look at both Legacy PBX and new VoIP systems.