Asterisk bills itself as "the world's leading open source PBX, telephony engine, and telephony applications toolkit." You can use it as the basis of a fully featured, enterprise-class phone system in your organization. Like any complex piece of software, you'll have some work to do coming to grips with what it can do and how to set it up. One ideal way to get up to speed fast is by going on a three day Asterisk Fast Start training course offered by Digium, the company that sponsors the Asterisk open source project.

The Fast Start course assumes no previous knowledge of Linux - the platform on which Asterisk runs - or any knowledge of corporate telephony. Having said that, the course is designed for people who are responsible for corporate telephony, who understand IP networking and who would be familiar with the network topology in their organization...

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