AsteriskConnect development

History 
The AsteriskConnect product was originally designed as an interface between the AMI 1.0 (Asterisk 1.4) and the PeterConnect attendant software, because many of the existing attendant applications for Asterisk didn't fulfil our needs. We found the existing and successful PeterConnect attendant (used with Cisco Call Managers) and contacted their development which was interested in working with us. To allow more interconnection options we preferred connecting using a standardized protocol; The well known TAPI protocol was first chosen but quickly ruled out as it was considered End-of-Life, as a result we chose CSTA/XML-III. 

Building your own solutions 
The AsteriskConnect works perfect with the PeterConnect Attendant software, but what if you want to connect other software? Well, we use the industry standard CSTA/XML-III protocol (ECMA-269), and as a result the AsteriskConnect software can also be used for other interfacing solutions. Simply connect over an TCP/IP socket and send/receive CSTA messages in a XML format. In this manner you can easily develop your own applications to communicate with Asterisk based systems without having to worry about Asterisk version differences or the difficult tracking of calls involved in various kinds of transfers.

New developments
There are several ideas for new developments, whether or not the will become available soon depends on the amount of customers requesting a certain feature. Ideas for development are currently;

SOAP/XML support
Using SOAP/XML for CSTA messaging is a popular way for many CSTA applications to communicate. However, communication is currently done using XML over a TCP/IP socket connection on port 1500. We already started building support for SOAP/XML but the development has temporarily been halted. Please let us know if you need this feature, the more people asking for it, the bigger the chance of use building it!

MS Lync RCC support
MicroSoft Lync servers do not offer some of the powerful feature in Asterisk, which is why many people are looking for a way to connect their Asterisk server to the MS Lync server. The MS Lync server offers the Remote Call Control (RCC) feature, which used CSTA over SIP. CSTA over SIP is something that could be relatively easily be implemented into the AsteriskConnect software by implementing a SIP Proxy, however the MS Lync Server also requires many non-standard CSTA messaging. Please let us know if you need this feature, the more people asking for it, the bigger the chance of use building it!

Phone remote control using uaCSTA
​Many newer IP phones support uaCSTA to remotely control them instead of using their proprietary techniques. As a result building uaCSTA support in the AsteriskConnect would quickly expand the amount of supported phones.