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Have any of you set up an asterisk phone system and connected it to a paging system. Just wondering what kind of experiences any of you have had?

I've not done the Asterisk part of it, but we have installed paging systems in several kidney clinics, where their IT person is putting them on Asterisk systems. It was as simple as using an 1/8" mini plug into the sound board output to the input of the amplifier. The paging is totaly funky. The users have to dial a myriad of codes to access it, then they record their announcement, then hang up. The Asterisk then outputs a canned message with "Attention! Attention! An announcement is being made", followed by the user's announcement.

Not really very professional!

Why not use a trunk port or slt station?

It dosen't have to be that way the sound card output can feed the audio direct to amp just like a normal paging system

And the canned part of it can be changed to a recording of a tone, or series of tones.

I was browsing through products for paging, as that was my recent project on my ESI, and noticed there are some specialty products that provide a standard IP extension to Asterisk, but then output to a paging amp. So it's not reliant on Asterisk itself, but a single dialable extension.

The simplest way to set-up paging in asterisk is as follows (Assuming you already have a working soundcard and have verified it from within Linux):

1) Edit alsa.conf or oss.conf (depending on which one you use with your particular Linux, I prefer alsa). Configure it to Auto-Answer. The Directive is near the top of the file 'autoanswer=no'. change the no to yes. You also need to make sure that in modules.conf you only have Alsa or Oss loaded, and not both. You can not mix Alsa and OSS.

2) Make a Paging Context in your dial-plan. For this example the context will be paging. This will play back a beep on the overhead before letting them talk. You may need to change aplay to whatever sound-file player you use. Again, I like Alsa.

[paging]
exten => s,1,System(/usr/bin/aplay /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/beep.gsm
exten => s,2,Dial(CONSOLE/dsp)

3) Add a paging extension into your dial-plan to call the paging context. I typically use 8200 as a paging extension. The line I add to my phone's dialplan context is as follows:
exten => 8200,1,Goto(Paging,s,1)

4) Restart asterisk (if you did not have the Alsa or OSS module loaded). If you already had the correct modules loaded, simplly do a 'extensions reload' from the asterisk CLI and test from an extension by dialing '8200'. you should hear a beep and then your live voice.

The problem with the "Professionalism" of asterisk is that everything in it is a series of scripts that you must write. There is absolutely nothing Canned within asterisk. So the real problem with the paging of those kidney clinics was the retard that thought that having a pre-annoucement annoucement was a good idea. Also, paging should be a simple extension (wether it's 1 digit, or 10) to the system. If they had a myriad of numbers to get to it, that was also not smart. I do think that recording the announcement, and then having playback can be a good thing depending on feedback/echo issues. Your mileage may vary.