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So, I was wondering how hard it would be to host my own dialer.
I see people all the time popping up with new companies with dialers, they all seem to be based around a couple pieces of software, with the exception of Mojo, which is a physical dialer, not a soft pbx (more in a minute on that) and if like any dick paul and harry can pop up in a day with a dialer company, I figured how hard can it be right.
I did some research. Found that there are several open source solutions, available online, you can just go download and install yourself. They're not very demanding on hardware. I figure I can get by for myself and my downlines forever with a max of 8 lines, so I bought hardware that was able to do that and I'm starting the install.
So, heres how these things work:
First a couple terms.
A PBX, and I may be totally wrong about what it does EXACTLY, but a PBX appears to be the part of a phone system that transfers and handles the phone lines, in laymens terms.
Asterisk: A software based, linux, PBX.
Linux: an operating system-- like windows but free and way harder to use.
SIP: the language used to communicate between telephone devices.
Softphone: a phone on your computer.
X-lite: a software based SIP phone.
SugarCRM: The CRM Al talks about all the time. It's cool, you can customize it to death, and its rock solid. I had a solid install of it set up over the weekend in spare time and I had no idea where to even get started. It's linux based, so I wouldn't say its necessarily "user friendly" but this would also work with a windows install of Sugar. Sadly, the PBX software is linux only, so you do have to use it at some point.
Now, I've settled on an installed open source dialer called Vicidial. The reason being, I paid for a hosted version of this software before, and its solid. It works through any softphone, x-lite being the most popular. It has capability to detect voices, answering machine detection, predictive dial function, can support 20-40 users depending on hardware.
I'm planning on myself and people directly downline of me using this thing, and I really like ringcentral already, but good news there, ringcentral does provision SIP phones, so it should work to dial with no hiccups. I can just add lines to my ringcentral acct.
If I want a 3 line dialer, I need 3 digital lines, so it'll cost me about 60 bucks a month extra on my ringcentral acct.
It's built in perl, so I'm planning to have to customize it some, but at least its in a language that isn't terribly hard to negotiate with a manual.
I drove around town till I found a old dell off lease optiplex today, its a p4 or celeron 2.6ghz with a gig of ram. First thing I did was pull the harddrive and replace with a 10,000rpm raptor. Apparently the harddrive speed has a profound effect on MySQL, and people said not to skimp in that department. I still got out for 150 bucks buying the computer local and I had the harddrive laying around. Total cost would have been 200$ if I did it online.
Got a Brand New network cable. It's not 100% necessary, but I'm a stickler for doing this, I've had horrid issues in the past with network speed and it always ended up being related to the stupid cable.
Stopping here for a second, for all those keeping score at home, I'm up to spending a total of 200$. How much is a monthly dialer subscription?
So burned the ISO I downloaded from VICIbox, popped in the disk, then followed the instructions on http://download.vicidial.com/iso/vicibox/server/ViciBox_Redux_v3-Install.pdf. There are some things that are slightly off, but it mostly makes sense if you have some computer knowledge.
This is basically as far as I've gotten for now. But I'll give updates when I get this thing working about how hard it actually was.
To me, I anticipate the hardest part will be integrating the sugarCRM software back with the dialer, because they're going to have to post to each other via http gets, and curls, which means I'm going to be doing some scripting.
Always fun.
That's where I am now, I'll post a follow up when I get farther along, so people can have a better idea what we're paying for and how to do it themselves.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Shockingly the entire dialer install went without a hitch.
I can already make outbound calls (single line), import csv files, etc. The setup went exactly like the tutorial said.
This is mind boggling. Usually windows application installs don't run this smooth.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Got a different softphone today, the x-lite was nice for testing, but after some research I found one called Blink.
Here's the cool thing with it. It syncs with google contacts, and since I'm syncing my crm with google contacts also, ALL my contacts are caller ID enabled and can be searched and dialed.
Initially I wanted to use zoiper, because they make a version of it that doesn't require that the asterisk system call you, its a javascript based phone that basically hides in the webpage itself and you never see it, but when I looked into it it turns out it costs 750 british pounds to license, and I'll take free over 1000$ every day of the week, on top of that zoiper doesn't sync with contacts, so it was a no brainer.
I see people all the time popping up with new companies with dialers, they all seem to be based around a couple pieces of software, with the exception of Mojo, which is a physical dialer, not a soft pbx (more in a minute on that) and if like any dick paul and harry can pop up in a day with a dialer company, I figured how hard can it be right.
I did some research. Found that there are several open source solutions, available online, you can just go download and install yourself. They're not very demanding on hardware. I figure I can get by for myself and my downlines forever with a max of 8 lines, so I bought hardware that was able to do that and I'm starting the install.
So, heres how these things work:
First a couple terms.
A PBX, and I may be totally wrong about what it does EXACTLY, but a PBX appears to be the part of a phone system that transfers and handles the phone lines, in laymens terms.
Asterisk: A software based, linux, PBX.
Linux: an operating system-- like windows but free and way harder to use.
SIP: the language used to communicate between telephone devices.
Softphone: a phone on your computer.
X-lite: a software based SIP phone.
SugarCRM: The CRM Al talks about all the time. It's cool, you can customize it to death, and its rock solid. I had a solid install of it set up over the weekend in spare time and I had no idea where to even get started. It's linux based, so I wouldn't say its necessarily "user friendly" but this would also work with a windows install of Sugar. Sadly, the PBX software is linux only, so you do have to use it at some point.
Now, I've settled on an installed open source dialer called Vicidial. The reason being, I paid for a hosted version of this software before, and its solid. It works through any softphone, x-lite being the most popular. It has capability to detect voices, answering machine detection, predictive dial function, can support 20-40 users depending on hardware.
I'm planning on myself and people directly downline of me using this thing, and I really like ringcentral already, but good news there, ringcentral does provision SIP phones, so it should work to dial with no hiccups. I can just add lines to my ringcentral acct.
If I want a 3 line dialer, I need 3 digital lines, so it'll cost me about 60 bucks a month extra on my ringcentral acct.
It's built in perl, so I'm planning to have to customize it some, but at least its in a language that isn't terribly hard to negotiate with a manual.
I drove around town till I found a old dell off lease optiplex today, its a p4 or celeron 2.6ghz with a gig of ram. First thing I did was pull the harddrive and replace with a 10,000rpm raptor. Apparently the harddrive speed has a profound effect on MySQL, and people said not to skimp in that department. I still got out for 150 bucks buying the computer local and I had the harddrive laying around. Total cost would have been 200$ if I did it online.
Got a Brand New network cable. It's not 100% necessary, but I'm a stickler for doing this, I've had horrid issues in the past with network speed and it always ended up being related to the stupid cable.
Stopping here for a second, for all those keeping score at home, I'm up to spending a total of 200$. How much is a monthly dialer subscription?
So burned the ISO I downloaded from VICIbox, popped in the disk, then followed the instructions on http://download.vicidial.com/iso/vicibox/server/ViciBox_Redux_v3-Install.pdf. There are some things that are slightly off, but it mostly makes sense if you have some computer knowledge.
This is basically as far as I've gotten for now. But I'll give updates when I get this thing working about how hard it actually was.
To me, I anticipate the hardest part will be integrating the sugarCRM software back with the dialer, because they're going to have to post to each other via http gets, and curls, which means I'm going to be doing some scripting.
Always fun.
That's where I am now, I'll post a follow up when I get farther along, so people can have a better idea what we're paying for and how to do it themselves.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Shockingly the entire dialer install went without a hitch.
I can already make outbound calls (single line), import csv files, etc. The setup went exactly like the tutorial said.
This is mind boggling. Usually windows application installs don't run this smooth.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Got a different softphone today, the x-lite was nice for testing, but after some research I found one called Blink.
Here's the cool thing with it. It syncs with google contacts, and since I'm syncing my crm with google contacts also, ALL my contacts are caller ID enabled and can be searched and dialed.
Initially I wanted to use zoiper, because they make a version of it that doesn't require that the asterisk system call you, its a javascript based phone that basically hides in the webpage itself and you never see it, but when I looked into it it turns out it costs 750 british pounds to license, and I'll take free over 1000$ every day of the week, on top of that zoiper doesn't sync with contacts, so it was a no brainer.
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