Visual Dialplan is rapid application development platform for Asterisk dial plan development. It features a drag-and-drop visual modeling environment and a large component library. In addition, it offers useful dial plan examples, a robust validation engine, and single button deployment functionality. It can even gather information to use regarding Asterisk server configuration and pre-populates library components with configuration data to easier dial plan development.

The platform helps create a new dial plan, preserve or upgrade an existing dialplan, and test Asterisk IVR, queues, conferencing, voicemail, TTS, ASR and other capabilities.

The Visual Dialplan enables users to view inbound and outbound call flows making contexts and subroutines descriptive and validates dialplan before it is deployed to the Asterisk box. Users can develop Asterisk dial plans using Visual Dialplan and then deploy them directly to Asterisk, Free PBX, trixbox, PBX In a Flash or Elastix server.

Besides building standard Asterisk dialplans Visual Dialplan can be used to build powerful voice applications based on LumenVox speech recognition technology.

System Requirements

Current version of Visual Dialplan is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.

Visual Dialplan requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6.0 which is bundled with the Visual Dialplan downloadable package and and should not be downloaded and installed separately.

Downloading Visual Dialplan

There are two versions of the Visual Dialplan.

Visual Dialplan Standard is intended for average Asterisk user and includes commonly used components that are sufficient in most cases like VoIP and traditional dial in and dial out, auto attendant, IVR, voicemail, conferencing, music on hold, voice recording, etc.

Visual Dialplan Professional is intended for advanced Asterisk users, consultants and Asterisk professionals, and includes full list of components and functions available in the Asterisk dialplan. Beside features supported by the Standard version, this version includes additional features that will enable:

· Asterisk dialplan integration with third party applications

· Creation and manipulations with Asterisk queues (ACD)

· Billing related components

· ASR related components
and other advances components and functions.

Using Visual Dialplan

After starting the Visual Dialplan you will be offered with the quick start dialog. We recommend you to start with some of the sample visual dialplans provided with the downloaded package. Visual Dialplan is shipped with several sample dialplans that can be used for educational purposes and may be a good starting point for building your own dialplan.

Organize contexts, macros and variables

When you open existing dialplan or create a new one, you are first presented with the context view.

Visual Dialplan enables you to organize and describe contexts, macros, channel and global variables. You can easily switch between context, macro, global variable or channel variable views using the left navigation bar.

Set the connection to the Asterisk server and check the server configuration data

Enable Visual Dialplan to read the Asterisk server configuration data and accommodate its behavior accordingly, by defining the connection to the Asterisk server at preferences dialog. Then check the Asterisk server configuration data by opening the Asterisk configuration view.

Visualize your call flow

With Visual Dialplan you can simply drag and drop components and connect them to design the call flow. Components are organized on the component toolbar in the following categories: Call flow, Call management, Billing, ASR, ACD, etc.

Model don’t code

Visual Dialplan provides specialized editors for each component. Just double click the component from the working area and a property editor will appear. You don’t have to know syntax and properties for each and every dialplan application. Property editors provide easy and intuitive way for setting these values.

Find information in the local help system

All the information you need to build a dialplan is now available on your desktop, integrated with the Visual Dialplan and presented in a natural way – no need to search the Internet or list the books, just select the component and press F1 to get all the information about that component.

Validate the dialplan

Check the dialplan before deploying it on the Asterisk box. You can validate a dialplan for errors using the validate toolbar button. Components that are not properly connected or configured will be marked in red and all errors will be listed in the info area.

Develop ASR voice applications

Visual Dialplan is perfect tool for building Asterisk dial plan voice applications.

It supports all Asterisk speech recognition related dial plan applications (LumenVox dial plan applications) and comes with feature rich grammar editor.

Free PBX, AsteriskNOW, trixbox, PIAF, Elastix ...

Visual Dialplan supports open source Asterisk PBX but it also supports FreePBX, trixbox, PBX In A Flash, AsteriskNOW and Elastix.

You can simply create extensions, voicemail boxes and trunks using FreePBX (Elastix, trixbox, PIAF etc.) and then do all the dial plan magic with Visual Dialplan.

AsteriskNOW, PBX In A Flash, FreePBX, trixbox and Elastix are the property of their respective owners

Deploy the Dialplan

When you are ready to deploy the dialplan, just select one of the deploy servers, from a list of configured servers, and click on the Deploy button. Visual Dialplan will generate standard Asterisk dialplan code and either save it to the local file system or deploy it to the remote Asterisk server using SSH. Visual Dialplan will also reload Asterisk server configuration thus making dialplan changes immediate.

Visual Dialpolan CodeZone

Visual Dialplan Code Zone is a website for developers to find solutions, share ideas and solve problems. It includes a wiki containing tutorials, code snippets, dial plan examples and will include tools to simplify development and testing.

http://codezone.apstel.com