Asterisk: The Definitive Guide

Leif Madsen first took an interest in Asterisk while attempting to find a voice conferencing solution for him and his friends. After someone suggested trying Asterisk, the obsession began. Wanting to contribute and be involved with the community, and noticing the lack of Asterisk documentation, he co-founded the Asterisk Documentation Project. Leif is currently working as a consultant, specializing in Asterisk clustering and call-centre integration. You can get more information at http://www.leifmadsen.com. Jim Van Meggelen is a founding partner of Core Telecom Innovations, a Canadian-based provider of open-source telephony solutions. He has over twenty years of enterprise telecom experience, for such companies as Nortel, Williams and Telus, and has has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Avaya. Jim was the architect of two of the world's largest managed enterprise voice networks; each solution serving roughly twenty-thousand users in more than one-thousand communities across Canada, providing telecommunications in five different languages, through six time zones, administered completely from a central location. These networks pioneered the use of extensive automation and database control in a branch voice network - functionalities not generally available in proprietary telecommunications systems. Jim has now moved on from the world of proprietary telecom, and is commited to open-source telephony. Jim is one of the principal contributors to the Asterisk Documentation Project, and is co-author of the bestselling O'Reilly book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. He enjoys teaching, public speaking, improvisational acting, and writing. Jim lives in Toronto. Russell is the Engineering Manager for the Open Source Software team at Digium, Inc. He has been a core member of the Asterisk development team since the Fall of 2004. At the first AstriCon in 2004, he was named the release maintainer for Asterisk's first major release series, Asterisk 1.0. He has since contributed to almost all areas of Asterisk development, from project management to core architectural design and development. Russell received a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Clemson University in the Fall of 2006. He is currently working on a master's degree in Software Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.