IP-PBX Can Make You Look Like a Large Enterprise

Desk phone PBX is short for private branch exchange, a private telephone network used within a business. Users of the PBX share the outside lines for making outgoing phone calls. Most medium-sized and larger companies already use a PBX because it's much less expensive than connecting an external telephone line to every telephone in the organization. It is also easier to call someone within the business because the number you need to dial is typically just 3 or 4 digits. In addition the PBX facilitates many other features such as call transfer.

However, the price range of the PBX with good features used to be much above what small businesses can afford.

Asterisk to the rescue

With the arrival of free open source software it is now possible to get a PBX for a small business with feature sets that were only available in very expensive ones earlier. The free open source software that made this all possible is the Asterisk project.

Asterisk has a ton of features including the following:

Voicemail to Email
IVR Menu System
Conference Rooms
Follow-Me
Time-Based Routing
Music On Hold
Paging and Intercom
Web Access to Voicemail
Fax Support

If you or your team has the technical skills and the inclination, you can download Asterisk software free of charge and install it and set it up for your business.

Easy-On Asterisk

However, there are some convenient packages available that make the task of installing and configuring Asterisk easier. They also bundle easy-to-use graphical interfaces for configuration and administration.

PbxInAFlash: According to their web site, you can install PbxInAFlash on a $199 dedicated PC for a small office.
TrixBox Community Edition: You can see examples of small businesses who use the TrixBox CE on their web site.

These software packages allow you to use a typical office PC, install the downloaded software and then login to the interface to copy/paste provider's configuration samples. With time, you gain more experience and will be able to tweak the many features available to suit the specific needs of your business. Please note that these do not run on Windows, these are all based on the Linux operating system.

Please read our Precautions FAQ before downloading.

Plug and Play

If you don't want to go through the selection of hardware and the installation process, you can consider a commercial IP-PBX from the above vendors or Foncordiax. The commercial Foncordiax IP-PBX is bundled with their hardware, runs the free open source Asterisk software internally and offered as a branded product. Also it is sold, installed and serviced via their dealership network.