AstriCon Schedule

Session information to be announced.

Speaker: Flavio E. Goncalves

Room: Chambers - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 10:00 a.m. - 10:35 a.m.

Track: Security Master Class

Cost Plus World Market replaced their existing store telecom infrastructure with largest known retail based Asterisk solution. Spanning 4000 extensions across 265 locations, the solution delivered companywide extension to extension dialing, in-store paging, call park/pickup, central greeting and speed dial management as well as many other features. This case study will cover the system architecture, highlight the key Asterisk features that contributed to the successful deployment, review the scripts and customizations made to streamline implementation and maintenance, and discuss some of the pitfalls to avoid.

Speaker: Steven Porter

Room: Grand Ballroom II - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 10:00 a.m. - 10:35 a.m.

Track: Business and Case Studies

Session information to be announced.

Speaker: Matt Riddell

Room: Kennesaw - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 10:00 a.m. - 10:35 a.m.

Track: WebRTC and Integrations

In this talk we'll be exploring an alternative method to providing distributed call queues for Asterisk. We'll be talking about and demoing how Python and Redis can provide distributed queues outside of Asterisk.

Speaker: Paul Belanger

Room: Grand Ballroom I - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 10:00 a.m. - 10:35 a.m.

Track: Tutorials and Developer

Learn about the tools and methods for analyzing a VoIP attack and hacked PBX.

Speaker: Nir Simionovich

Room: Chambers - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m. - 11:35 p.m.

Track: Security Master Class

In 2010 TWR, a global nonprofit media ministry, began replacing its mélange of proprietary PBX systems with Asterisk. The challenges, issues and resolutions of this project will be discussed. Also very importantly, the cost savings realized as a result of this deployment will be discussed. As TWR matures in its use of Asterisk, ongoing maintenance and issue resolution will be another aspect of this talk. This session will be of interest to anyone considering a multi-site deployment of Asterisk, especially on a limited budget.

Speaker: Cassius Smith

Room: Grand Ballroom II - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m. - 11:35 a.m.

Track: Business and Case Studies

During this session you'll learn several valuable lessons about implementing WebRTC services with Asterisk. From tips and tricks to troubleshooting and useful utilities.

Sangoma has used Asterisk as a WebRTC gateway interfacing with the company's own Session Border Controller (SBC). This integration allows the creation of applications such as client-less click-to-contact email signatures, context sensitive click-for-support (where the SIP headers of an inbound call to support contain information to help route the call to the best support person for that issue) and other innovative web-based communications applications.

In creating this functionality Sangoma has uncovered a number of techniques that are helpful when implementing WebRTC, interesting information about the internals of the Asterisk WebRTC module and a number of debugging and troubleshooting tools that work well for this kind of implementation.

In this presentation, Moises Silva, manager of software engineering and the chief architect of this project at Sangoma, will share his experience in designing, implementing and debugging WebRTC services using Asterisk.

Speaker: Moises Silva

Room: Kennesaw - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m. - 11:35 a.m.

Track: WebRTC and Integrations

An homage to Leif Madsen's "5 Things You Didn't Know Asterisk Could Do", we'll look at several ways that the creative Asterisk admin can use Asterisk to do things you wouldn't normally associate with your phone system.

Speaker: Warren Selby

Room: Grand Ballroom I - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m. - 11:35 a.m.

Track: Tutorials and Developer

Watch Nir analyze the hack attempt that Philip did in Session 4. Nir will demonstrate how to analyze the attack while narrating his efforts.

Speaker: Nir Simionovich

Room: Chambers - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:40 p.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Track: Security Master Class

This session will go over the hardware and software components, as well as the architecture used to create an open-source based multi-tenant contact center system capable of supporting thousands of agents. Topics will include dealing with hardware failure, inbound and outbound load balancing, carrier issues and much more.

Speaker: Matt Florell

Room: Grand Ballroom II - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:40 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Track: Business and Case Studies

Session information coming soon.

Speaker: Matt Jordan

Room: Kennesaw - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:40 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Track: WebRTC and Integrations

A very practical discussion on how to connect Asterisk with Relational Databases using ODBC database abstraction layer. This session will cover the basics of MySQL/ODBC installation, configuration and integration with Asterisk.

Additionally will be made practical examples about the benefits of this union: improving dialplan with SQL Queries, store Call Detail Records (CDR) in DB, implementing Realtime Architecture (ARA).

Proposed session is for those who do not yet know benefits of connecting an Asterisk box to a database or are interested to learn about it through a very simple step-by-step demo.

Speaker: Francesco Prior

Room: Grand Ballroom I - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 11:40 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Track: Tutorials and Developer

This session will demonstrate a live SIP Hacker attack with and without automated hacker mitigation.  We will change configuration settings within Asterisk to demonstrate response messages to hackers to see how they numerate extensions to exploit. 

Speaker: JR Richardson

Room: Chambers - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 1:45 p.m. - 2:20 p.m.

Track: Security Master Class

It was 2004, and an “old telephone guy” (OTG) went to a conference in Atlanta, Georgia to investigate a piece of code he had only heard about a couple of days before. He was introduced to a young man who had spearheaded that coding effort and who informed the OTG that it was his speech a number of years previous which had caused Asterisk to be a “Free and Open Source Software” (FOSS) project.

By the end of the conference the “old telephone guy” stated that “Asterisk would generate as much money as all of the rest of FOSS combined.”

It is now ten years since that conference, and 65000 members in 170 countries seem agree with this premise. While the total figures are still out, Asterisk is well on its way to fulfilling that promise.

This talk will look at some of the reasons why Asterisk and FOSS together were successful where other strategies might have failed, and why in today's market FOSS is still the right answer for telephony and for Asterisk.

Speaker: Jon "Maddog" Hall

Room: Grand Ballroom II - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 1:45 p.m. - 2:20 p.m.

Track: Business and Case Studies

If you're comfortable around C code and you need to get every last ounce of performance out of your Asterisk installations then this is the session for you. The most important before making performance improvements is having a good understanding of where all the time is going currently. In this session I'll provide a survey of different techniques used for figuring out "Why can't my Asterisk system process more calls?" and show how tools like LTTng (Linux Trace Toolkit - next generation) can allow you to trace multiple processes on a single system and across systems, like when you have Asterisk running on one box and your call control scripts running on another.

Speaker: Shaun Ruffell

Room: Kennesaw - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 1:45 p.m. - 2:20 p.m.

Track: WebRTC and Integrations

In this session we look at the source code of 3 different apps.
The first app displays a twitter timeline on your phone.
The second app displays stats from the queue to the display of the agents phone.
The third app integrates an OpenLDAP directory to the phone.

Speaker: Tom De Moor

Room: Grand Ballroom I - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 1:45 p.m. - 2:20 p.m.

Track: Tutorials and Developer

Session information to be announced.

Speaker: Wei Tang

Room: Chambers - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 2:25 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Track: Security Master Class

With more than 68 newspapers and other titles, Berkshire Hathaway Media Group has challenging telecommunications needs. Having selected Asterisk and Digium’s Switchvox solution to replace many of its aging legacy systems, the last 12 months have represented many changes and interesting projects. Voneto will present a selection of case studies from its work with BH Media, including:

• Using Digium Swithvox and Asterisk to replace legacy PBX platforms.
• Asterisk and Kamailio to facilitate enterprise-wide centralized VoIP routing.
• An enterprise-wide fax sending and receiving solution based on Digium’s Fax for Asterisk (FFA) module.
• ...and much more!

Speaker: Corey McFadden

Room: Grand Ballroom II - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 2:25 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Track: Business and Case Studies

With a low barrier to entry, the market very quickly became crowded, and prices fell to the basement. Now anyone off the street can get sub-1-cent per-minute US LD with no minimums. That business model is dead. For many companies, salvation came in the form of moving upstream to offering virtual PBX, or the more buzz-wordy "Cloud PBX". But once again, the field is full of competitors and with very little to differentiate. Why should any customer choose you? If you answered "price", you're going to lose.

This presentation is all about solving that problem: how to create differentiated real-time communication services that allow you to charge your customers for the value you create, rather than for the minutes they use.

Speaker: Ben Klang

Room: Kennesaw - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 2:25 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Track: WebRTC and Integrations

This talk will be focused on the most recent best practices developed through the development of a complex, database driven IVR system. In this talk, we'll start with the basics of why you want to use subroutines, how to create them and call them, and work our way up to a database driven example.

In the example, we'll show a simplified version of the system developed at Thinking Phone Networks whereby a portal interface writes to a database, which instructs which subroutines to trigger, and how re-entrant subroutines can both be a blessing and a curse.

Speaker: Leif Madsen

Room: Grand Ballroom I - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 2:25 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Track: Tutorials and Developer

Ask the experts or listen to their tales of attacks and horror stories from the past. Based on the successful security panels from 2011 where experiences and stories were shared by both the panel and the audience.

Room: Chambers - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Track: Security Master Class

Berkshire Hathaway Media Group’s management team faced many challenges in charting its telecommunications strategy. From convincing open-source skeptics of Asterisk’s bona-fides to building a business case for it--as well as selecting a partner to implement and support things--it was an uphill battle. Learn why one of the world’s most successful companies selected Digium and Voneto to help it remake its telecom infrastructure.

Explore the business case for open-source, ROI and risk-analysis, as well as many other topics.

Speaker: Martin Conroy

Room: Grand Ballroom II - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Track: Business and Case Studies

Session information to be announced.

Speaker: Max Schroeder

Room: Kennesaw - First Floor

Time: Thursday, 3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Track: WebRTC and Integrations

In this session, we'll do a brief resume of Session Description Protocol, which is used for any SIP calls. We'll see the various vocabulary used when exploring the SDP and looking at some examples of SDP used when making SIP calls. We'll take a quick look at Asterisk configuration and their impacts on SDP. We'll analyse some Wireshark captures and learn how to debug it in a much faster way. We'll end with some audience questions.

Speaker: Clod Patry

Room: Grand Ballroom I - Second Floor

Time: Thursday, 3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Track: Tutorials and Developer