Tomorrow, at the ClueCon show in Chicago, I’ll be annoucing Open Diesel, an open source voice application written with Adhearsion.   OpenDiesel provides a complete work group management solution for small to medium enterprise, using adhearsion to integrate the phone with real business management issues. What does it do?

• Provides a complete IVR written in Ruby, with helpers for menus, multiple dialing, etc.
• Provides a complete user interface written using Ruby on Rails, for an easy to use configuration tool for both users and administrators.
• Supports PSTN numbers as extensions, providing a completely virtual PBX.
• Supports automatic creation of workgroups, including insertion into the dial plan, right from the Ruby GUI.
• Supports workgroup scheduling from the user interface, so you extension only rings when you tell it to.
• Supports dialing multiple phones and employees to answer an inbound call.
• Forwards voice mails to everyone in the workgroup
• Supports click to dial, call history, etc. from the GUI

How did this happen? About a month and a half ago, Jay Phillips, the creator of adhearsion, came to me with a project. He had written a workgroup application using his library, but he had time constraints, and asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking over the project and finishing it up.  I said… um… yeah!  Near the end of my work, I offered to support OpenDiesel in return for the sponsoring company making it open source. They were completely cool with that, which of course, is completely cool.

And who are they? EngineYard.  EngineYard is the premier (like really, they are) Ruby on Rails hosting company, and home to some seriously smart people like Ezra Zygmuntowicz, their chief architect and author of a Pragmatic Programmer’s Rails Deployment Book and Evan Pheonix, creator of Rubinius – the Ruby virtual machine. You might also know them as the guys who host cool tools like GitHub and Lighthouse.

And when is it ready? It’s in production now, so I guess it’s ready enough.  We have about ten bugs in the database, so there’s still a little work to do, but it’s quite far along in the process. The site will go up soon, and I’ll fork the source in GitHub as soon as I get off the stage tomorrow. For all you adhearsion geeks, I think it’s an excellent example for documentation and examples. If you’re around… see you tomorrow!