What is it?

The Asterisk TAPI driver is a TAPI Service Provider for Asterisk, it interprets windows commands from programs such as Outlook and ACT to Asterisk instructions on the Asterisk Manager console.

Current state, it can perform call origination. That is from Outlook you can click on a contact and select call contact, your phone will ring and when you pick up Asterisk will call the number requested.

So you want it?

Simple, go to the AstTAPI download page -
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=106482 and run the installer, it will ask you for a reboot at the end so make sure all your work is saved. It is a very simple process there are no hard questions at this point.

Once installed and rebooted you need to ensure that you have a Asterisk Manager account setup, this is done on the Asterisk server, in your Asterisk configuration directory there is a file manager.conf, you need to add a line for every user who wants to log onto the server in this fashion.

An excerpt of my manager.conf

;
; Asterisk Call Management support
;
[general]
enabled = yes
port = 5038
bindaddr = 0.0.0.0

[nick]
secret = mysecret
permit = 10.20.1.0/255.255.255.0
read = system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user
write = system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user

When you reload then the Asterisk manager will be available to the network.

Next configuring the TAPI driver, this has to be done from your TAPI application – I use Outlook so for the purpose of getting up and running will explain my steps.

In Outlook go into your contacts folder. Right click one of your contacts and select “call contact”. The window which appears now has fields filled in with which number to call and the name of the contact. Select the button for "dialling options" underneath this, and when this window appears at the bottom there should be “Connect using line” use the pull down list to select “Asterisk”, then you can select “Line Properties”, here we need to fill out a few fields.

Host – this is the host name or IP address of the server running the Asterisk manager
Port – 5038 – default
User – the user you set-up in manager.conf
Password – the users secret you set-up in manager.conf

User Channel – this is the your extension, it terms of the channel name in my case it is Sip/nick
Outgoing Chan – this is the channel which external calls are placed over, you can get this information from extensions.conf, in here you will find a section which defines external calls, in the top of my file I have “TRUNK=CAPI/870582:” AstTAPI will use this and append the number to the end of this channel to place the call. In my case I place “CAPI/870582:” into this field.

With all of this filled in you should be able to start making calls.