AstriCon 2017

This presentation will cover: How VICIdial got it's start, the challenges in interoperating with Asterisk as it changed over the last 14 years, the evolution of the VICIdial user interface, where VICIdial is going in the future, how to survive as an open-source project and thrive as a business while still giving away your product for free, and reasons why many large enterprise-level call centers have chosen to go with VICIdial as their contact center solution.

The world of containerized applications continue to evolve at a dizzying pace. Docker open-source is now a subset of the Moby Project, Kubernetes continues to build out their vast range of features, and everybody is talking about them both. But what does this mean for you, the Asterisk administrator or developer, who doesn't have time to follow the constant churning? This talk will go into depth on how to deploy a geographical distributed cluster of Asterisk machines utilizing Docker Swarm. We'll cover everything from initially bootstrapping the swarm through deploying to multiple DigitalOcean datacenters, how we can automatically route SIP traffic to the closest server to the endpoint, and what happens when a node fails. We'll cover the self-healing and intelligent aspects of Swarm routing and how they can be leverage to avoid downtime and scale up quickly. The goal of this talk is to leave you with concrete, actionable steps you can take to Swarm-ize your own Asterisk installation.

Today's world is unimaginable without the internet. We buy products, file our taxes, pay bills, apply for jobs, stream entertainment and communicate with people all around the world over it. But this isn't the way things always were. Think about what it was like to buy a product before the internet existed. Buyers actually needed salespeople to help them make a buying decision. The internet changed everything. And it turned the buyer-seller relationship upside down. Today, the information a buyer needs to make a purchase decision is just a click away. The power in buying and selling has shifted to the buyer from the seller. Keeping up with today's empowered buyer means that the sales process needs to change too. Whether your sales process relies on inbound leads or targeted outreach, whether you're a big or small company, whether your product is simple or complex, inbound sales is relevant. Attend this session and learn: 1. The difference between 'Legacy' sales and the 'Inbound' sales process. 2. The three stages of the Buyer's Journey. 3. How to develop a sales process that supports your buyer through the journey. 4. The Inbound Sales Methodology. 5. Incorporating social media into your selling process.

Mojo Lingo has developed multiple high-throughput outbound dialer solutions based on Asterisk and other components. Over the course of those projects, we acquired a solid knowledge of how to best scale them by utilizing specific configurations, modules, and components such as message queues and Adhearsion. The application layer is then compounded by specific tools that enable us to do autoscaling and real time monitoring, with a focus on self-healing and node recovery. The presentation is about our journey to 1000 calls per second, and will be divided in three sections: numbers and statistics will be presented first, to introduce the discussion. Following that, echnical recommendations will show what our choices were, and how they were made, both inside and around Asterisk. The third section will be an exploration of the load testing and monitoring tooling used during development, from SIPp to higher-level tools... and even Asterisk itself can be very useful as an user agent! Finally, I would like to present our "top 10 scaling tricks" to be applied to any application, not just an outbound dialer. Code and configurations will be available and explained during the presentation.

Janus is an open source WebRTC server that was conceived to be modular in nature, a bit like Asterisk itself. It has a core that takes care of all the WebRTC suite, and different plugins that can take care of the Janus API transports and how to handle media in different ways, e.g., WebRTC SFU/MCU, RTP-to-WebRTC broadcasting, SIP gatewaying, recording and so on. One particularly common scenario is using it as a WebRTC gateway in front of Asterisk servers. While Asterisk has good support for WebRTC by itself, there may be cases when unencumbering it from any WebRTC-related effort, and leverage such a gateway instead to let Asterisk focus on the rest, might be helpful, and this talk is aimed at discussing exactly those. Different approaches and possible topologies will be presented, together with real examples of how Janus and Asterisk are used together in the wild today (e.g., to stream IETF meetings).

Demonstration of creating a sample IVR using .NET Core 1.1 and AsterNET.ARI in Visual Studio Code. Developers will configure a base Asterisk install, create a new ARI application using .NET Core and AsterNET.ARI, and will create a sample call flow that will allow traversal of a basic IVR tree.

Looking to start a new voice business or create a voice application? Learn about the true costs, pitfalls and business models currently working well for others, and those that cause many to remain stagnant or close the doors.

A case study which demonstrates the versatility of asterisk. I work in a firm with 300 plus users and 9 offices across the globe each with a redundant set of asterisk servers. We initially had a mishmash of PBXs and held off of building asterisk platform from scratch thinking that it would be too much development and management however with the use of mercurial, some automation and deployment via ansible and tower we are able to push through new features and changes like never imagined before and immediately across the network. We had unusual challenges being a small company with a global footprint with offices that don't have robust internet connections due to their locations and needed a tailor made solution. We also set up dedicated mediaservers to handle voicemail and conference calls via a custom app based on confbridge. Through the use of phoneprov we manage devices and are able to finally keep these up to date and rotate device username/passwords. With SIPp we automated most testing and through the use of Homer we track sessions. We're looking forward to expand on all this with WebRTC and as asterisk implements more video capabilities e.g. confbridge SFU . In short, asterisk can look daunting at first but there is a incredible amount that it can do and if I managed to make it work for us there is no reason others can't too.

Countless research reports and day-to-day stories have shown a continuous increase of Toll Fraud, becoming a multi-billion global threat with monetary damages more than double that of Credit Card Fraud. In this talk Dan will walk the audience through various mechanisms implemented in CGRateS for detecting and real-time blocking the Toll Fraud in the billing component of a carrier network, making them available to distributed Asterisk based platforms via ARI communication. CGRateS is a battle-tested Online Charging System with support for both Prepaid and Postpaid billing modes.

Find out how FreePBX® grew to be more than just an easy way to write config files for Asterisk®, to becoming the most widely adopted Open Source PBX Platform and EcoSystem in the world. In this talk, we will provide an overview of what the FreePBX® project is and the history of how FreePBX® has evolved into what it is today, including how our millions of users continue to benefit as the project evolves. Come learn about how the projects has evolved and what's coming next.