Asterisk Under Fire?

From my first contact with the open source IP PBX toolkit called Asterisk, I fell in love with it ... both as an IT expert and as a business-savvy person. Come on, what could be better than free (as in free lunch) as well as free as in free speech?

But of course, Asterisk - the pure one has never been for the faint of heart. U get to configure text files and keep track of several of them, not to talk of a somewhat cryptic commands. To be fair ... Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home) makes this a lot easier and of course there is a webmin module for Asterisk.

However, I ran across this Windows tool that really targets Asterisk head-on. It is called 3CX (http://www.3cx.com/) and does at least 80% of what Asterisk does. Being a Windows application, it is very easy to configure and very ¨monitorable¨. It even has this presence application built in that allows any user see the status of the other before they place their calls. There is a FREE version available for download as well as commercial options with support. I think this is really coooooooool - even though running anything on Windows always gives me an un-easy feeling (as if I am in the crosshairs of a hitman) - But this is definitely one project to watch.