Jared

So, in my last post I praised Microsoft. In this one I’m going to a little bit of bashing. Hold your applause. Those familiar with Exchange know that in previous version, an Exchange Admin user could log into another mailbox via POP3 or IMAP using the Domain\Username\Mailbox Alias. I was hoping to use this to then setup a IMAP storage for voicemails in Asterisk without having to know each users password. Alas, this is not possible with Exchange 2007. I don’t understand why they removed this feature. I have suspicions that it might be related to their own Unity Messaging solution (but I think that just because it thwarted my attempts of getting some of the same functionality without using their solution).

Now most of the things I discuss on this blog are related to open source. I love open source but I also think that Microsoft has some amazing offerings (thank goodness comments are turned off ). Today I downloaded the Exchange 2007 virtual machine offered from Microsoft for evaluation purposes. My purpose was to try integrating Asterisk voicemail with Exchange using IMAP for unified messaging. While becoming familiar with 2007 (used 2000 and 2003 previously) I came across the Unified Messaging part of 2007. It is simply amazing. Asterisk’s voicemail is on par with it, it is the auto attendant that I can see some nice value with (if you are running an environment based on Exchange anyway). There is a how to on integrating Exchange 2007 with Asterisk. A SIP proxy is needed since Exchange 2007 only talks SIP over TCP and Asterisk only does SIP over UDP.

Well, I finally got around to trying out the new chan_mobile channel for Asterisk. To start off, I’ll explain my hardware in use. My phone is a Nokia 6133. I’m using the trunk versions of Asterisk and asterisk-addons (which contains the chan_mobile module). My bluetooth “host” adaptor is a Trendnet TBW-105UB.

The first step (besides compileing Asterisk) was to pair my phone with my Asterisk server. This proved to be quite difficult. I am using Ubuntu Dapper for my OS. Here is my hcid.conf in case anyone had the same troubles I had. Once paired I started Asterisk. I used the mobile search command to find the Bluetooth Address and port for my phone. I then exited Asterisk, added my phone to mobile.conf and restarted Asterisk. Lo and behold, it worked. Asterisk was the “headset” for my phone. (more…)