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I just realized that we have a button on our current phones that allows you to speak over the PA system in the factory. Can this be done in Asterisk over the sound card or something?

Absolutely. Asterisk can talk to sound cards, bluetooth headsets, analogue or ISDN telephone lines, SIP, H323 and other VoIP protocols. It can glue them together in any way that you like. You want a one way output to the sound card on the Asterisk machine on Extension 4? No problem.

Check out what Ben (BAKup) said and rummage through the voip-info.org wiki. It is a mine of information and growing fast.

Asterisk@Home is definately a good place to get started quickly. What makes it great is the Asterisk Management Portal (wait, they changed the name to FreePBX). It is a web based Asterisk management tool and pretty easy to use. I tried to get this going on my Gentoo install and it was messy in places. It requires Apache to be run as the Asterisk user and a bunch of other seemingly kludgy permissions hacks - I think I would have more luck running a second copy of Apache for it on a different port. Anyway, Asterisk@Home is good because it all just works when you put the disc in Great if you have a dedicated machine for it.

I am about a third of the way through the Asterisk: The Future of Telephony book. It is a good read so far and really does start at the beginning. You should have a look.