The Asterisk Development Team has announced the release of Asterisk 1.8.0-beta1. This release marks the beginning of the testing process for the eventual release of Asterisk 1.8.0.

This release is available for immediate download at http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/

All interested users of Asterisk are encouraged to participate in the 1.8 testing process. Please report any issues found to the issue tracker, http://issues.asterisk.org/. It is also very useful to hear successful test reports. Please post those to the asterisk-dev mailing list.

Asterisk 1.8 is the next major release series of Asterisk. It will be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, similar to Asterisk 1.4. For more information about support time lines for Asterisk releases, see the Asterisk versions page.

http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk-versions

Asterisk 1.8 contains many new features over previous releases of Asterisk. A short list of included features includes:

• Secure RTP
• IPv6 Support
• Connected Party Identification Support
• Calendaring Integration
• A new call logging system, Channel Event Logging (CEL)
• Distributed Device State using Jabber/XMPP PubSub
• Call Completion Supplementary Services support
• Advice of Charge support
• Much, much more!

A full list of new features can be found in the CHANGES file.

http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/branches/1.8/CHANGES?view=checkout

For a full list of changes in the current release, please see the ChangeLog:

http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.8.0-beta1

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!