TouchStone Technology

Technology "upgrades" for TouchStone Technology have been exciting to implement.

We changed the website engine from joomla to drupal. The joomla site seemed more flexible, but that flexibility made it more difficult to manage, I think... at least for us. We need a site that's a little simpler, and we really aren't looking for article contributions right now, so joomla's biggest strengths were wasted on us.

Drupal also has a great deal of flexibility, but the concept of a framework on which to hang all of our content lets me concentrate more on that content than on its organization. The default configuration works for us with a minimum of tweaking.

The other open-source change that we made was to replace our old, reliable Protege pbx with Asterisk and FreePBX.

The Protege was the epitomy of "closed-source". Not only is the source code unavailable, but the vendor (and service technicians) even try to keep us, the owner, from being able to configure our own equipment. That was always unacceptable, but we lived with the situation for a while before changing to open-source.

Of course, there's a lot of trial-and error... (LOTS of error) in managing our open-source pbx, but we're learning quickly and really like being in control.