Recommendations

[mperry]

Hope this is in the right forum and apologise if its not.

I came across Vicidial about 3 months ago and have been looking at it on and off since then. I've a lot of experience with 'commecial' dialers and I want to take on vicidial as a product I can offer predominantly in smaller call centres (<30 seats)

I'd like to ask for some advice in a couple of areas as I have very little previous experience of Asterisk or vicidial (I do have 20 years in telecoms / call centres with Inter-Tel, Avaya, Amcat, Touchstar, NMS Adaptive however)

what do you consider to be the best starting point - goautodial or vicibox?
Is there a gui for asterisk that can be used with either?

Thanks

[williamconley]

1) GoAutoDial has a prettier interface (admittedly this interface can be transplanted into Vicibox if the version matches). GoAutoDial is also CentOS (which makes a difference to some enterprises which require Redhat Linux or a relative of same, which CentOS is).

2) GoAutoDial is supported by Gardo (and I think he may have another technician now as well, but I'm not sure) whereas Vicibox is supported by The Vicidial Group and pretty much "anyone" who knows Vicidial (which is the actual software being installed). Of course, I support both but I'm an independent, nosy person I may not count.

3) Vicibox WILL install (out of the box, as it were) both the SVN (latest code, 2.4 developer trunk) and even Cluster versions (ie: a box JUST for web or JUST for dialer or several for each purpose or the SQL or ALL or any mixture). Whereas GoAutoDial is predominantly designed for single server installations. Ordinarily Single Server is about 25 agents max unless the hardware is extreme or there are no recordings or compression at all. If any of those things happen, you may not even get 25 agents on one box.

4) Vicibox's release dates seem to be more recent, last one about a month or two aga (although we haven't had one in a while since 3.1.9, but that would likely be because the bugs seem to have worked out and Kumba is letting it wait until 2.4 releases, as a guess). GoAutoDial has been a few months since release and historically is about once every year or two.

5) Vicidial IS a GUI for asterisk. That's kinda what it does.

[mperry]

Thanks for the helpful comments,
It would seem then that for the market I'm in (<30 seats with majority <20 seats) that either fits the bill nicely.
My first project will probably be to clean a list of approx. 250,000 numbers for a client and remove all the unobtainables. Its a low pressure/risk job with no agents etc. to worry about.
I've downloaded both GoAutoDial and Vicibox and will look at them over the next days with the above project in mind.
Thanks once again

[williamconley]

if you want to remove bad numbers, consider acquiring a 2nd client (preferably a non-profit) to allow you to call and ask for donations. following the correct laws, you may be able to validate these numbers while getting paid twice, legally.