News: California city implements Asterisk; saves $260K

[Ben Scott]

On Feb 7, 2008 3:56 PM, Christopher Chisholm
<christopher.chisholm at syamsoftware.com> wrote:
> While reading this I was wondering how much knowledge you'd need
> to be able to implement something like that.

  I imagine a non-trivial measure of skill, experience, and knowledge
would be required.

  But thing is, *that would be required anyway*.  My duties at $DAYJOB
include the care and feeding of our Norstar key phone system.  Norstar
is one of the best proprietary key systems out there.  The equipment
is expensive; documentation is hard to get, direct end-customer
support is non-existent (by design; the whole industry is built around
the "reseller channel" model), configuration is moderately cryptic,
and dealing with telcos and telephone technology is arcane and
tedious.

  Anyone tackling a project on the order of "replace phone system for
entire city" is going to be prepared to do some serious learning and
vendor-wrangling, regardless of FOSS or proprietary.  I expect it was
this one guy's full-time job, and he likely had staff to help him.

> Would anyone here be confident in your ability to do what he did, under
> similar circumstances?

  Similar circumstances?  Sure.  See above.  :)

  In general, I'm confident in my ability to learn anything, given the
resources to do so.  That's what any job is about: Learning.  If you
can do that, you can do anything.  :-)

-- Ben