Completely Lost- Need help creating Free PBX from ground up

Hello,
My boss just asked me to set up our PBX system. I have never seen anything like this before and I am completely and utterly lost. After 3 days of working on it I have made no progress, and all the forums and help that PBX provides isn’t really written in English. They offer no explanation for what their acronyms mean, nor do they offer any type of support.

I am completely lost and dont understand this system. How on earth do you create a trunk? What is dial manipulation and how do you put it in (what goes where). How do you set up outbound and inbound calls, how does the dial patterns work? How do you set up an extension. And how do I set it so customers who call us get routed through the PBX? Theres no place that says “Use PBX when people call this__________ number.”

I have read everything I can find and none of anything makes sense to me, its like PBX and PBX users dont speak english. Im super frustrated, can anyone help?

Glad you read your post as to me it seemed like you were saying you were sending him a PM.

Anyway, that’s over. I had also just finished deleting a bunch of spam so I was trying to get done. Few words can seem short, sorry about that. The ink wasn’t even dry on your account yet so the benefit of the doubt was not in your favor.

Anyway, welcome and thanks for offering to help other members.

In reading my first post… it DOES sound like I was soliciting… sorry was NOT my intent… I was trying to say that given the situation that he is in, not knowing anything and his boss wanting some results that paying for support from the schmooze people would be the best bet…

again sorry if it sounded wrong…

Not soliciting, just trying to help. Been having issues of my own…

Note that I specifically mentioned “paid support seems like a must”…

I was going to try and help him at least get it installed… you know trying to be nice… :slight_smile:

Hmmm, well… not sure where to start… :slight_smile:

I can help as best I can, though I too have some issues… is your boss willing to pay for support? Sounds like its a “must have” in this case.

I think you can email mew direct from the forum, Ill help where I can.

To answer your question you create trunks in the trunk screen. Routing in the inbound and outbound routes and number manipulation can be done per trunk.

You setup an extension in extension app. What kind of phones did you purchase?

If you need support, use the official FreePBX support. If Besperson is soliciting you, he has only been a member for 3 days and we don’t permit direct solicitations.

You may want to take a look at the installation Guide and Getting started guide on our wiki: http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/HTGS/How+to+Get+Started+Home

You can also view our guides on most of the modules, which should be enough to get you a basic installation. http://wiki.freepbx.org/display/F2/Connectivity+Modules

We also have paid support options if your are interested in having one of our professionals, build your system for you. See http://schmoozecom.com/oss-signup.php

Okay, your first decision is where to install FreePBX, Premise (on your own equipment) or hosted (see FreePBXhosting.com)

Sounds like you already made it past this step.

Step 2 Installation, you can install your system using the following instructions http://schmoozecom.com/video/install-freepbx-distro.php (skip this step if already installed.)

Next determine how you are going to provide “trunks” a trunk is basically your connectivity to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network.) or in layman’s terms, how you place and receive calls to and from outside of your phone system. There are several types of trunks, but I’ll assume you are looking to utilize VoIP trunks and not connect to regular phone lines (POTS Lines- "plain old telephone service. A SIP trunk connects your PBX over the internet to a communications provider, each SIP trunk provider will configure their trunk connections a little differently, depending on the methods used to connect to their services. When using FreePBX the easiest carrier to configure will be SIPStation.com because the SIPStation module integrated directly into FreePBX. When purchasing SIP service you will purchase Trunks (which provide the call paths), and DIDs “Direct Inward Dial” numbers, which are phone numbers utilized with a PBX. The DID can be routed using INBOUND ROUTES to a specific destination on your PBX, for example you can have a DID that your companies Main number routed to a RING GROUP that rings multiple extensions at once, or to an IVR “interactive voice response” that gives callers a choice of destinations (press 1 for sales, 2 for support…etc.) and you can have additional DID that point directly to an individuals extension, making it much easier to call them directly.

Once you decide on a carrier and get your trunks set up, you will then want to start building your system, by creating Extensions for your phones, Inbound Routes to point your Incoming calls to the correct place. Outbound Routes which tell your system which trunks to use for different types of calls, for example, when you dial 911 in most cases you will want to send that call out a particular trunk, utilizing a DID that is enabled for e911 services for the address of the location of the phone dialing 911, so you would set up an outbound route just for 911 calling. You then would want to set up additional outbound routes for each type of call you will allow on your system, without a matching route a call will not be placed. So you can set up a route for local, long distance, international and so on. If you don’t want your users placing international calls, don’t create a route for that type of call.

Once your extensions are created you can then connect phones to those extensions, the Commercial Endpoint Manger is a great add-on to your system, as it will do most of the heavy liftion for you when creating extension…

Spend some time in the FreePBX wiki, there are many articles and download 'The more you utilize the system the better you will be at it, if you get stuck you can always post in the forum, you can also purchase paid support to have one of our techs assist with your initial configuration and setup.

Thanks guys/gals. You have been extrememly helpful. I cannot say that I understand the system as a whole yet, but it is slowly making sense. Unfortunately, I have read many things in the wiki, its just many users write in a way that makes little to no sense to me.

So thank you so much for your assistance! It is appreciated. I will continue to work on it, and if I encounter problems I know where to ask.

BTW- ‘he’ is actually a ‘she,’ LOL thanks tho!

Is it the terminology that is hard to understand?

You didn’t answer any of our questions. For instance I asked you what type of phones you bought.

Yes, please share any questions you may have, and if you find particular articles confusing feel free to post a link and we can take a look at cleaning up the confusing parts. The wiki was a a fairly new addition to the site, as it should be easier to navigate and update than our prior documentation within the forum, but it’s a work in progress.