Anyone who thinks Asterisk is a toy is not playing in the real world of VoIP Telephony. You may be surprised to learn how many commercial product offerings are built on an Asterisk base. For this reason, we have become more involved in this code base as each day goes by. We are becoming increasingly more interested in its properties, capabilities and proper place in our solutions tool belt. Yes, Asterisk might be "free", but does that disqualify it from serious consideration? Did "free" limit the acceptance and rapid adoption of Linux, Php, Perl, Filezilla, WireShark and a growing library of other contributions that continue to define new industries? More often than not, these software contributions have been bundled with support and ongoing research and some amazing products have resulted. In fact, when we think we already know about all the most popular Asterisk Distro's we stumble over a gem of a solution that is an astonishing implementation of an Asterisk base. A Canadian based company has been making significant advancements in the Enterprise market on a global basis, with a stellar product that far exceeds the offerings of other popular Asterisk distributions. This company has to be the best kept secret in the industry and we are over whelmed at the scope of there accomplishment and the depth of their feature set. The company that has us so excited produces Scopserv a fully formed iPBX telephony solution. We were introduced to this solution quite accidentally, but after working with this solution, we now see it as among the best implementations of Asterisk in the market today. The solution offers a fully featured iPBX with all of the bells and whistles. The GUI interface is an amazing step forward in the state of the art and includes most of the functionality that others might obtain through third party add-on. The solution provides for "tenant" services and buddies a very complete Automatic Call Distribution solution with advanced graphical web reporting, complete with wrap codes! Phone provisioning can be accomplished automatically and is predefined for most of the popular VoIP phones in the market. We recently had a ShoreTel deployment in which there was a desire to add SIP trunks and provide for a small remote office. Using the Scopserv, we were able to easily accomplish this integration. The Scopserv provided "friend" connectivity to an ITSP for local DID's in a remote market. We then created a SIP tie line between the Scopserv and the ShoreTel. The tie line included a number of off premise extensions that were SIP extensions registered to the Scopserv at the branch end of the TIE line. The TIE line easily passed phone calls both ways, enabled LCR access to the remote SIP lines and generally provided to be an excellent solution! There was no need for any external firewall beyond that provided by the Scopserv. The Scopserv folks have done a remarkable job! They have taken Asterisk to a new level, packaged it with proprietary functionality and wrapped the entire offering within an excellent documentation and support package! The company has a considerably large installed base outside of the US and for that reason, the are virtually unknown in the American market. On a global basis, however, they are doing very well! They have a growing list of success stories and new feature capabilities! To accommodate the 10 minute limit, I have two video clips: one on configuring ShoreTel SIP using the Scopserv as a border controller; and one that reviews the Scopserv in great detail. As always, comments are welcome! http://youtu.be/m_QBdgwOma8 http://youtu.be/sUU-XDotc_U