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Suggestions for predictive dialing software

You are right, to a degree. It is telemarketing but it is for one of our clients that wants to do a phone survey of their customers. The contact list will be relatively small compared to most telemarketing installs but your number could be on the list since our client is Georgia based. And since this entire project will be for calling people who have a prior relationship with our client, the Do Not Call list doesn't apply. That said if this works (this is just a test for us to see if we want to get into this for other clients) we may end up with a broader call base and the DNC may come into play there so being able to scrub numbers based on the DNC list would be a beneficial part of the program.

As to Asterisk, I've had a LOT (and I mean a lot) of people try and talk me out of using it. They all claim it is difficult to setup and some even went as far as to say "you wouldn't be talking to me if I were managing an Asterisk server because I would be stuck in the server room all day". Now granted I've never used the CLI version of it but the GUI version (Trixbox) doesn't seem that complicated and seems like something I could handle. I do know Trixbox lets you manually edit any file but you have to be careful what you edit and how because it could get overwritten by Trixbox. We were going to go for a Call Manager Express setup on a Cisco 2821 router but we needed to scale it back a bit and Asterisk made the most sense considering I already had a spare server to stick it on (we still need to get the 2821 router at some point but it's not as important now).

My thoughts on using Asterisk have been bouncing back and forth. On one hand I'd rather use something that I can get support on if I need it. While there is plenty community based support out there and I can now buy support from Fonality if I need it, it's not what I would call enterprise grade support. Cisco while being more expensive has the enterprise backing, granted I don't know Cisco that well either but I am leaning and I know my way around IOS already so I've essentially got a leg up on that one. Asterisk is cheaper though (basically free except for the hardware, which I already had) so it won out with my boss.

The people trying to talk me out of Asterisk were other IT people, not employees. The employees here with the exception of the two owners (one is a computer guru and my boss, the other spent 20 years as a Bellsouth manager) know nothing about phone systems. I understand what you're saying about not really learning via the GUI but it's what I've got to work with and I don't see it changing anytime soon unfortunately.

reply to JoelC707
I'd vote for Asterisk in the case of delivering a survey. I highly doubt a Callmanager Express install could handle a large call volume that a survey would generate, plus getting Callmanager to talk to a database to record the responses will be much more difficult if not impossible. Call Manager Express is geared towards branch offices which need a survivable remote gateway in order to function if the phones can't talk with the main call manager server. As far as I've ever seen, it really isn't setup to be used for generating automated calls.

Hire a Asterisk specialist to write an AGI script that connects to a database backend. It would maybe take him a weekend to get it all working and you'd still wouldn't have spent as much as if you bought a 2821 with the Call Manager licenses and interface cards.