SARK Introduction
SARK is a lightweight Voip PBX for the SMB/SME market segment. It is based upon Digium's Asterisk switching platform. SARK will run on any of the following platforms:-
- Ubuntu bionic/focal (amd64, armel, arm64)
- Debian Stretch/buster (amd64, armel, arm64)
- Aelintra's embedded S200/S300 (ARM) platforms
The product has established a reputation for being easy-to-use with a very small footprint while being functionally able to compete with traditional proprietary PBX offerings at a much lower overall cost-of-ownership.
SARK background
SARK has been around in one form or another since 2006. In V2 & V3 it became apparent that the idea of scrollable tables becomes unwieldy with high numbers of endpoints. With some of our customers having more than a thousand extensions on a single system we needed a better way to handle large display tables. In the end we decided to make use of jquery to provide fast, sortable, searchable tables with ajax cell update where practical. We also received a lot of requests from customers to provide limited admin capabilities for differing levels of user so we added an admin user page which allows the superadmin to create other admin users, with varying levels of authority. In 4.0.1 this was further extended to allow individual end-users to easily manage their voicemail and BLF phone features (Aastra, CiscoSpa, Polycom, snom and Yealink) from their own login screen. In V5 the front-end was rewritten to better exploit client-side functionality, mainly using JQuery. In V6 the front-end was again rewritten to exploit HTML5 and W3CSS, which enabled the intelligent use of a variety of screen sizes including tablets and smartphones. In the upcoming V6.3 and V7 we have rewritten the C code backend to better serve our larger multi-tenant clients. Among other things, V7 allows overlapping extension ranges between tenants.
