Elastix

Elastix as a communication platform for people with disabilities on emerging countries
Functionality, quality and low costs are difficult to obtain. Many SMB companies around the world have the dilemma to implement top technological solutions to enhance their businesses, but must overcome the budget challenge. This case study demonstrates how Elastix can be adapted to scenarios wherefunctionality and quality are very important and the project budget is restricted. To show how to solve this equation we looked up for several cases with these characteristics. After exploring many interesting cases, we chose a group of them that caught our attention; mainly because they show how Elastix is being used as a solution to be implemented in social projects, whether they´re private orgovernmental. It is rewarding and interesting to develop functionalities that can be used to implement communication projects that integrate people with disabilities into society. It is interesting not only for the technological point of view but for the budget side as well. In this document we will present three projects implemented in three different Latin American cities. In one of them we will see the useof Elastix as an entertainment solution for blind people, while in the other two we will see how Elastix helped create effective platforms that made possible to reinsert people with disabilities to working environments.

Elastix
Elastix is an open source unified communications solution. The licensing model, which promotes the free use and distribution of software, allows lower costs and focuson the budget which sometimes it is not given such importance but it can make the difference between success or failure of a technology platform, such as services . One of the reasons why Elastix has become very popular in many countries, is the ease to carry out implementations of telephony configurations that can extend to advanced configurations and can integrate advanced customized tools. Thereason for this ease of integration is the free access to the software code. In this document will look how Elastix integrates with other software tools such as JAWS (for voice synthesis), Asternic Call Center Stats or even custom development.

Cases description
The selected deployments for this case study have been made by expert companies in the telecommunications field. These companies havedecided to use Elastix to perform their projects. The companies Atech Comunicaciones and IPtegra, from Colombia, develop their activities with the goal of integrating handicapped people in a working environment, while the company Proximus from Chile offers an entertainment service based on social networks with the purpose of integrating blind people.

Atech Comunicaciones – Medellin on roadsThis case was made in the ADA Foundation in Medellin - Colombia. The main objective of the case was to establish a call center platform in which agents were people with some type of mobility difficulties. An essential requirement posed was the inclusion of remote working possibilities, because people with movement limitations often have difficulty going to the office. For this reason the wholeimplementation of the project was made so the agents could work from home Elastix 2.0 and its Call Center addon were installed, both components of free distribution. At the beginning of the project 30 agents were included, all working remotely on regular computers. Previously existing equipment and infrastructure was used. To optimize the access of remote agents to the main server, IAX2 extensionswere created. The registration of these extensions was done using the ZoIPer softphone which supports IAX extensions. One advantage was the low investment in telephones (the chosen softphone is also freeware), while another advantage was the possibility to maximize the uptime of each agent due to the stability of Elastix. For reporting, a custom development was made according to the customer’s...