Page 343 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Congratulations! You’ve successfully installed basic IMAP voicemail support with As-
terisk! This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. With IMAP voicemail storage, it is
easy to implement shared (e.g., departmental) voicemail using shared IMAP folders.
Many companies already have departmental email, so having a shared voicemail box
is a very natural and logical progression of the technology. With IMAP voicemail stor-
age, each employee can manage several voicemail boxes without becoming confused
as to whether a particular voicemail message is for them personally or for a department
to which they belong. There is nothing unusual to configure from Asterisk’s point of
view; you simply call the VoiceMail() application with the desired mailbox and context,
and make sure that the department employees have the shared IMAP folder included
in their email client’s folder list.
Finally, you may want to use per-mailbox authorization (i.e., each voicemail box au-
thenticates as a specific user) instead of a global Asterisk IMAP user. Asterisk supports
this through the imapuser and imappassword options in the individual voicemail box
definition entries:
[imapvoicemail]
100 => 1234,Sue's Mailbox,,,imapuser=sue@example.tld|imapsecret=suesimapsecret
101 => 5555,Bob's Mailbox,,,imapuser=bob@example.tld|imapsecret=bobsimapsecret
In this particular example, if a message is left in IMAP mailbox 100 in the
imapvoicemail context, Asterisk will authenticate to the IMAP server as sue@exam
ple.tld, using suesimapsecret as the password. Similarly, bob@example.tld/bobsimap
secret will be used to authenticate if a message is left in mailbox 101 of the same
voicemail context.

Storing Voicemail in an ODBC Database

In case you missed it, you can also store voicemail in a database via the ODBC con-
nector. See Chapter 12 for details!

Asterisk and Jabber (XMPP)

The name Jabber is actually the original name for the IETF XMPP protocols (RFC
3920-3923). Since Jabber is by far a better name than XMPP, the original name has
stuck. This protocol was originally designed to be a decentralized, nonproprietary,
open-standards messaging and presence framework. It supports offline message deliv-
ery and encryption, and has grown to include voice messaging, which Asterisk sup-
ports.
It is interesting to note that in the beginning, Jabber was seen as a competitor to the
SIMPLE protocol, which is SIP-based. XMPP is designed as a more general protocol,
and is of course XML-based.

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