Toronto Asterisk User Group

[ full synopsis pending ]

Presenter:

Kim Locke, Networking Engineer
Indigo Books and Music

Synopsis:

What was the telecommunications world like before VOIP? How did companies raise the capital for massive phone systems? Why was it important to stay with one vendor for your hardware, software, and support? How did you know if there was a problem with your system? Why can't I send my voicemail notification to my email?

Kim will be answering all these questions and more concerning administration of the Meridian line of PBXs. She will also speak about how these are implemented in a retail environment at Indigo.

Presenter:

Matthew Gamble, Team Lead, Voice Application Services
Primus Canada

Synopsis:

Cisco's latest line of Small Business Phones now support "XML Applications", which can be delivered to the phone from a standard web server, allowing you to deliver dynamic content directly to the phones and send user input back to the server. This talk will cover the layout, development, and deployment of these applications as well as interesting uses for these abilities as XML browsers become more ubiquitous in desk phones.

Presenter:

Mark Chignell, CEO of Vocalage Inc. and the Director of the University of Toronto Interactive Media Lab.

Synopsis:

The functions of the telephone are largely driven by the requirements of nineteenth century technology. The telephone uses mono audio, as do modern speakerphones. Aside from echo cancellation and improved sound codecs, speaker phones have not been customized to facilitate voice conferencing.

In this talk the use of spatialized audio to enhance voice conferencing in the Vocal Village system will be briefly introduced. We will then describe a ten-key pad voice conference controller that was developed with Oki Electric Corporation to meet the needs of Japanese teleworkers with physical disabilities when they collaborated on web design projects. That will be followed by a discussion of our work in developing a new generation VoIP speaker phone for business conference rooms. We will discuss prototypes built using Vaio and Nortech tablets and using a Breadboard computer.

The talk will include a discussion of some of the challenges faced in developing this kind of hardware solution and the relative advantages of different platforms for VoIP speakerphone development.

Richard is the founder and President of Positron Telecom, which produces innovative VoIP equipment for Telephony applications. He was previously a Sales Engineer, Territory Sales Manager and Product Manager at Eicon Networks and later Dialogic Corporation. From there he went on to start his own Linux consulting firm, which developed solutions based on OpenWrt and Asterisk projects, and created a line of embedded appliances at his company Bulletendpoints.

This month, Igor Ostaptchenko from Octanix Canada Inc. will be giving a talk on using Java with Asterisk. The presentation will be covering a range of introductory topics, including:

• What is Asterisk-Java
• Why Asterisk-Java
• How it works
• Some API details
• Sample application architecture
• Implementing Call Back Service: use cases, design, coding
• Design guidelines
• Demo of vanilla and web Enabled Callback Services
• Future thoughts on CTI application development using Asterisk-Java.

Igor Ostaptchenko is a freelance consultant specializing in Java/JEE Architecture/Development. He has worked for Ontario Government, Telus, Bank Of Nova Scotia, Insurance companies and has done Asterisk installation and Consulting.

Johannes Vanderknyff - Graduated with a degree in Horticultural Science from the University of Guelph, but has since worked for a variety of companies in the telecom industry including Motorola, Bell, and Rogers.

Always looking for simple solutions, he picked up a few technologies such as Asterisk and Ruby. Now, with Adhearsion, it has tied these two things together. You can now build web-based, database driven applications in minutes, get it connected to Asterisk, and build complex IVR applications simply.

The presentation will show how to use Ruby on Rails, Hobo, Adhearsion and Asterisk together. He will also demonstrate a phone testing application he made.

In order to keep up with the latest features in the Asterisk 1.6.x branches, this presentation will delve into some useful features that are in, or soon to be merged, into Asterisk. We'll touch on five really cool features, such as iCal/Exchange/Zimbra calendar integration, XMPP (Jabber) integration, IMAP voicemail storage, usage of CURL, and ODBC integration (func_odbc & adaptive_cdr_odbc). The slides will include the configuration used during the demo portion of the presentation.

Leif Madsen is an Asterisk consultant with over 5 years of experience, and is a co-author of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, published by O'Reilly Media. Leif has built clustered solutions for ITSPs and call centres, and specializes in Asterisk database integration in these clustered systems. He is also the primary bug marshal and release manager of Asterisk.

Presenter:

Dave Donovan
IT Manager, Nuvo Research

Synopsis:

This intends to give attendees an overview of the pfSense and Freeswitch packages and review the process for a typical home installation. This will not be a step by step walkthrough but will include some screenshots and discussions of basic configuration options. The walkthrough, slides, and references should prepare attendees to build their own pfSense + Freeswitch system in a weekend.

Advanced knowledge of Asterisk, VOIP, and firewalls are not required. New users should find the material and concepts very accessable. New users are encouraged to come out and ask questions. Discussion of more advanced topics like integration is encouraged as part of the Q&A but will not be part of the slide show.

By the end of this presentation, you will have an overview of:

• Installing pfSense
• Installing the Freeswitch package for pfSense
• Configuring a softphone to connect to Freeswitch
• Configuring an ATA as a client of Freeswitch
• Configuring SIP trunking
• Basic firewall configuration for a typical home application

Anyone interested in reading up or experimenting in advance can go to pfsense.org to download ISO or VMware images of pfSense.

Stephan Monette from Unlimitel.ca will be visiting from Ottawa to give a talk on Asterisk security. He will cover common techniques used to guess passwords, how to better protect your system, and discuss how to write custom applications in C with the goal of increasing system security.

There will also be some brainstorming on building honey pots/mouse traps to detect and dissect attack vectors.