Oh and I forgot to mention that I've implemented Cisco and ShoreTel as 
well andAsterisk is no where near them as far as ease of setup, 
features, user experience and whatnot.  But it is depending on size of 
implementation up to 1 billion dollars cheaper.  It also has all the 
features you probably want and is gaining features everyday (where is my 
find me follow me one?) so it is still a good way to go especially for a 
very small office.

For the simplest easiest VOIP system ShoreTel is my favorite, so easy 
normally we have the receptionist managing the MACs (moves adds changes) 
for the company.  And for a small company we can implement in a day.  
But the web interface for Asterisk isn't bad either.  If you already 
have Cisco routers the Cisco Express system is pretty cool, its 
basically a little linux box on a network module you just hook up to 
your router (that has an open NM slot and meets the minimum specs).  
Then you can just get some analog or PRI WICs and you are good to go, 
also great for backup features for remote offices.

Lots more to say, but no time to say it in...

--j
Sidney Cammeresi wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 at 11.59.00 -0500, Jeffrey Lehman wrote:
>   
>> I'm planning on setting up a small phone system (~5 phones) using
>> Asterisk for an organization and I'd like to hear what others who have
>> used Asterisk think of it.  What do you like about Asterisk and what
>> issues have you had?  Would you recommend using Asterisk over a
>> commercial PBX system and why?
>>
>> If the system is implemented, we would start off using the Digium cards
>> to interface with two analog phone lines, so I'm curious to see if
>> anyone has any experience with Asterisk and those cards and any issues
>> along those lines.
>>     
>
> I used Asterisk and a Digium card to build an IVR and voice paging system.
> Works pretty well.  I have no experience with more commercial systems,
> so I can't compare them.
>
> Only issue I had was that our machines were Sun V40z machines and on at
> least one of them, loading the card's kernel modules caused the machine
> to immediately reboot.  The card was observed to work in another V40z.
> I presume this is a slightly dodgy PCI implementation on Sun's or
> Digium's part.
>
> We took the issue up with Sun support, who told us that the card was not
> on their list of supported hardware, so they did not care.  Due to this
> as well as the multiple SCSI problems we have had with those machines,
> we responded that they were no longer our vendor.
>
> Also, with that machine, we only hooked up phone lines, but we would have
> had another issue if we wanted to hook up analog phones as the Digium card
> requires power from a molex connector thing to provide ringing voltage to
> phones, but the V40z machine has no such wires floating around inside it.
>
>