The Flash Operator Panel (or FOP, as it’s more commonly known) is an interface primarily for the use of switchboard operators. FOP uses Adobe Flash to present an interface through a web browser, and connects to Asterisk through the Asterisk Manager Interface (see Chapter 20, Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) for a discussion of the AMI).

There are two versions of the Flash Operator Panel: the original release (version 0.30, and is now a maintenance release only, and likely incompatible with Asterisk 11), and FOP2 (shown in Figure 25.1, “FOP2”), which is a vast improvement over the original FOP, but requires the purchase of a license for any system with more than 15 extensions.

Figure 25.1. FOP2

You can find FOP at http://www.asternic.org, and FOP2 at http://www.fop2.com.

In most call centers, it is not enough simply to be able to route calls correctly. Of equal importance to most queues is the ability for supervisory and management staff to determine how the queue and the agents are performing. For this, two things will be of benefit: live queue status information, and some manner of reporting package.

While Asterisk does a good-enough job of generating and storing CDRs, the records are in a very raw format, which makes it difficult to perform any sort of analysis on them.

Enter the CDR reporting package. In the 1990s, when long-distance rates were complex and expensive, an entire subindustry was spawned by companies looking to help other companies make sense out of complex long-distance rates. Nowadays, with long-distance being far less expensive, as well as generally simpler in terms of pricing model, there is less need for detailed analysis of call records. Nevertheless, many of these highly experienced companies have added support for Asterisk CDR analysis, and thus if you want excellent reporting capabilities, you will find a huge industry with many experienced participants.

For a simple interface to the call records, a popular program is CDR-Stats, which is the successor to the hugely popular Asterisk-Stat package. This open source reporting interface provides a simple way to examine call detail records, and some basic metrics on calling patterns.

The A2Billing project is not simply a billing interface for Asterisk: it is, in fact, a complete VoIP carrier-in-a-box. This complex and comprehensive product delivers much of the technology you would need to allow you to provide a VoIP reseller service.^[219]

The A2Billing platform has been generously released under the AGPL as open source. The sponsor of the A2Billing project, Star2Billing, offers consultancy services to get you up to speed faster.

In this brief chapter we have provided some pointers to popular graphical applications that can be used in conjunction with Asterisk. While we didn’t cover them in detail, we do acknowledge the importance of FreePBX, which provides a PBX configuration interface on top of Asterisk. If a full GUI solution for simple PBX configuration interests you, we encourage you to take a look at it. To give it a try, we recommend using the AsteriskNOW distribution, which provide FreePBX as its GUI.