FreePBX
is a full-featured PBX web application. If you've looked into Asterisk, you know that it doesn't come with any "built in" programming. You can't plug a phone into it and make it work without editing configuration files, writing dialplans, and various messing about.FreePBX simplifies this by giving you pre-programmed functionality accessible by a user-friendly web interfaces that allows you to have a fully functional PBX pretty much straight away with no programming required. Some of the features that FreePBX supports out of the box are:
- Unlimited number of Voicemail boxes
- "Follow Me" functionality
- Ring Groups with calls confirmation (so if, eg, a cellphone is out of range and diverts to voicemail, all the other phones keep ringing)
- Unlimited number of Conferences (limited by available CPU power - about 300 simultaneous users in conferences on a P4 3ghz - 600 with a dual core!)
- Paging and Intercom functionality for man SIP phones that support it.
- Music on Hold (via MP3s, or streamed off the internet)
- Call Queues
- And many other features
Some screenshots are available, to see what it looks like
FreePBX is built on the LAMPA™ stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Asterisk). It's a modular system, with click-to-install plugins downloadable over the internet from the online module repository.
