astro posted on August 18, 2010 10:49
A few years ago I got interested in being able to offer VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephone systems to my small business IT customers. I heard about Asterisk, an open source Linux offering, and thought ‘this is cool – a powerful phone system and it is free’. I spent a few weeks, after hours, gathering the hardware and software components and trying to get an Asterisk/Trixbox system up and running. As always, in the open source (free) world, getting technical support is difficult. After about a month I actually got my system working. At first I was happy – thinking I had something I could sell. On further reflection I realized that I had absolutely no idea how I had gotten it to work or why it had not worked previously and that there was no way I could sell and support this system. I just don’t have any background in Linux and don’t have the time or interest to develop it.
Enter Response Point. At an SMB Nation conference in Seattle, I saw a small demonstration of the Microsoft Response Point small business telephone system. This really got me interested. Response Point was a windows based, complete phone system with an extremely easy to use interface that someone with basic networking knowledge could easily learn and support. Hopefully you noticed the was in the last sentence. After a lot of money, excitement and support Microsoft made one of their great decisions and pulled the plug on this product which is ending 8/31/10.
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