What's New in Asterisk 1.4?

What's New in Asterisk 1.4?

Asterisk has come out with two major releases—1.4 and 1.6. The new features of Asterisk 1.4 are as follows:

• Pass through ITU standard T.38 fax calls: Asterisk now supports the passthrough of fax transmissions to a fax machine.
• IM support for Jabber and Google Talk: IM software that supports the Jingle protocol can now be connected to Asterisk.
• Whisper paging: This is a new feature of call barging, which allows a user to listen-in on a phone conversation and speak. However, the person listening into the conversation cannot hear the conversation. This feature allows an assistant to talk to someone else in the same office when they're on a call. For example, conveying time-sensitive or important information without the person on the other end hearing what's being said.
• Improved sound prompts (English, French, and Spanish): Digium re-recorded all the sound prompts and included higher quality sound files.
• Generic jitter buffer: In the past, the jitter buffer was developed just for the IAX protocol. In this new release, Asterisk now supports other VoIP protocols such as SIP and TDM interfaces.
• Shared Line Appearance: This feature mimics the traditional PBX Key Systems, allowing subscribers to share external lines (VoIP, ISDN, PSTN), and also provides status monitoring of the shared line. When a user places an outgoing call using such an appearance, all members belonging to that particular SLA group are notified of this usage. They are also blocked from using this line appearance until the line goes back to idle state or the call is placed on hold.
• Built-in voicemail system: In the past, you could either store voicemail as files on the Asterisk server or on an external database. Now voicemail can be retrieved through IMAP on any IMAP-compliant storage system. One benefit of this is unified messaging. This means you can now read a message in your email client and once it is marked read, you will see the MWI (Message Waiting Indicator) switched off on your phone.

For a complete list of changes since Asterisk 1.2, visit: http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/tags/1.4.0/CHANGES.