Hi
I am new to FreePBX I have used asterisk but new to this solution. I was planning on using FreePBX and Elastics and Impeccable etc… But 3CX has pretty much taken over Elastics and impeccable. 3CX seems as a company to be someone I do not want to work with and will not work with them but do not want to bad mouth anyone so will not get into why. Please tell me FreePBX is NOT going the same rout??? I do not want to spend weeks and $ learning it to have it end up as 3CX. One of there sales folks considers FreePBX as the enemy.
I think you mean Elastix not Elastics and Incredible not impeccable and even there PbxInAFlash not Incredible (which is still FreePBX, yes confusing) , both where once based on FreePBX, but culturally I think you will find that 99.99% of the folks here are not impressed by those sell-outs, it is impossible for 3CX to buy FreePBX because it is open-source and just can’t be.
Whilst you will likely spend weeks getting up to speed, you don’t have to spend a penny to deploy and use FreePBX.
Dicko
Clatuo mirada nickto
Or thank you That is reassuring. I do not mind paying but good to know it is an option. Sorry, my spelling in English is terrible. The spell checker gave me elastics and decided incredible should be impeccable. It also says my sister Glenda should be Gland. So I just call her Gland.
You take care dicko
Jim Bronson
Actually
Gort Clatue Mirada Nicktoe
You will note we essentially employ the entire elastix development staff. I won’t post any assumption of the 3CX business model but I will say there is no risk here. Sangoma cares deeply about the FreePBX community and ecosystem. When Sangoma took over stewardship they kept all of the staff and structure in place because it wasnt just a trademark grab. The users are not just a random metric. The community matters, the users matter.
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I would also add Sangoma is a publically traded company and has made clear that we value FreePBX and our company’s product offering all requires FreePBX to be around, growing and active.
I saw the Sangoma products from a link on free PBX. Look forward to using them. And thank you for taking the time to Answer. We are new to integrating VoIP but not new to using and implementing it. VoIP is growing at 25 to 28% per year. The Larger VoIP Companys are not a good choice. So it is very important we have a strong stable solution to build around. I will be taking a very close look at Sangoma producs as soon as we are Compatent with FreePBX. I am very happy to hear you have the elastics crew… I used that product once a few years ago for another company. They clearly know there stuff. Thus it is clear we are in great hands with FreePBX and Sagoma.
Jim Bronson
With Zulu mobile still unavailable, I was forced to take a look at 3cx recently. Indeed, we trialled it “live” for a month. There are strengths and weaknesses on both sides. 3cx seem a lot more “corporate” than Sangoma/FreePBX and very “stuck in their ways”. Suggestions people were making for functionality changes were, at best, met with indifference by both 3cx and their users alike. For example, setting DND on a handset on 3cx does not notify subscribers that the handset is busy… compared to Asterisk this just seems crazy to me - but 3cx insist that users would prefer to see this status on the Windows softphone client instead… 
I have come back to FreePBX with my tail between my legs, taken Andrew Nagy’s advice and opened support calls on a couple of issues I had with Zulu 3 - and hope that the Zulu Mobile client answers all my prayers.
You really can’t compare the team at FreePBX/Sangoma with 3cx - completely different culture
The issue with this isn’t a 3CX or Asterisk issue. The DND button that is on many phones by default is a local DND function. That means it sets the phone (the entire thing) to DND and it in no way tells the PBX (3CX, Asterisk, etc) what the status of the phone is. The PBX will only see that the phone is BUSY when it sends a call to it. In order for Asterisk/FreePBX to tell all the subscribers that device is BUSY the user must dial the DND Feature Code or use the UCP or other function that will update the status at the PBX level which will then trigger the NOTIFY messages to all the subscribers.
This is a common issue I’ve seen over the years, even with FreePBX. Users submit feature requests or improvements that are related to non-PBX level items or with a lack of understanding how certain features/functions work in general. The “indifference” is because nothing can actually be done about it and they just let it sit.
Also, the one thing I haven’t seen anyone touch on with the 3CX trend that is going on. Over a year ago 3CX was 100% Windows based, so even their “free” license require the user to shell out a Windows license fee. Now with the buyouts that 3CX performed they now have a full Linux based offering with their free level license. Part of their buyouts of these other companies was to compete with FreePBX in this space.
Just another little FYI, Nicholas Galea (CEO of 3CX) acquired shares in Sangoma back in 2016 and has been selling those shares since 2017 as part of his “investment” strategy. Nicholas announced sales of shares in July of 2017 and even back in May of this year he announced the sale of more shares of Sangoma stock. Even more fun information, Nicholas still has control of roughly 6.9% of the common shares for Sangoma on the market after these two announcements.
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Tom - with a reply like this you could actually WORK for 3cx - or at least be a reseller. This is EXACTLY the kind of response you get!
Actually the DND function in 3cx is actually quite good. It switches on the local DND on the 'phone but the 3cx soft clients update their status to “away”. This is not reflected by the BLF of monitoring subscribers though. Contrast this with dialling the feature code on an Asterisk device.
The feedback received by myself and other on the 3cx forum was close to derision - “why would you want to show the phone in-use when it’s actually DND”, “its the fault of the phone manufacturer that DND doesn’t show on BLF”, “there is no DND status that can be used in a NOTIFY”… all semi-true, semi b/s
For installations that don’t want to use a softclient and believe that a phone system is just a phone system, it’s nuts not to at least allow the installer to make DND indicate busy on subscribed extensions. Would it be nice if the phones supported a DND notify? Sure… but apart from Yealink handsets with their ridiculous “TALKING” label on an active BLF, a red light is a red light is a red light.
Most if not all phones allow their hardware DND button to be reprogrammed to send a DTMF sequence in which case pressing the DND button can easily send *76 or whatever and then ALL devices know the phone is busy/DND.
I have no comments to make about Nick Galea - he seemed quite reasonable when I “chatted” with him via the forums - although there is much evidence across the internet that he can be more than a little difficult to deal with.
I neither work for or resell 3CX.
As for the DND feature in the 3CX softphone doing things, of course it can. It’s a softphone designed to function with their PBX so the DND key on their softphone is going to do what it was designed to do. I was referring to non-3CX phones/softphones. You buy a Yealink, Polycom, Cisco SPA, Aastra, etc and hit the DND button on those phones they do what I described in my previous post.
There are PBX makers that have their own phones. These phones are designed to work specifically with the PBX in question. These will always provide more features and functions than a straight SIP device and yes, the PBX maker will push their phones over the use of other phones.
You wouldn’t. When you use the DND feature in FreePBX it sets the device state to BUSY not INUSE. INUSE pretty much means the device/extension is on an active call. At the phone level if they are in DND the phone will send back either a 480 or a 486 SIP reply to show that it is “BUSY”.
That’s BS. BLF is a two-factor feature. 1) The phone must be able to support BLF and 2) The PBX/Phone system needs to support Subscriptions. Each PBX/Phone system can have different ways in which they handle said subscriptions and how to subscribe and what to subscribe to.
Additionally, phones generally have a Subscription server option in them and a user/pass option for said server. If that is not set, it defaults to the SIP account/server for subscriptions. So really the subscription service could be a completely different server than the PBX. It’s actually done that way in a few different platforms.
At the device level? It’s just BUSY. There aren’t a lot of device statuses that need to be sent via a NOTIFY.
The other thing that people commonly get mixed up on is the fact that Presence and Device statuses are two separate things. Presence is for the user. The user’s Presence status can be multiple things from “Out to Lunch”, “On Vacation”, “In Meeting”, “Do No Disturb”, “Away”, etc, etc… Depending on the phone system and how it is set up, setting your status to one of those can in turn update the status of your device as well.
Some PBX/voice systems that have a chat element included can also offer statuses such as “Chat Only” which updates the user’s Presence status to show that while setting the device to BUSY but allow people to send IMs to them. However, when they set their Presence to Do Not Disturb not only does it change the device status it also changes their chat status and people can no longer send IMs along with calls getting the busy destination.
Again, a lot of this has to do with what the PBX/phone system can provide and support along with what the endpoint/devices (softphone or hardware) can also support in conjunction with the system it is communicating with.
FFS. I give up. The quotes you have used from my earlier post are responses 3cx gave me when I queried why a subscriber wasn’t notified the remote device was in DND - either by a specific notify or a general in_use/busy.
You completely missed the point of what I said 3cx softphone did - what I said was that when you put a 3cx-provisioned device in DND, the 3cx server notes the change and adjusts the user’s presence to match so the softphones show the DND status. This is kinda pointless though when they don’t notify subscribing extensions of the fact.
Whatever the mechanism I, as others did, would have liked the BLF to be on for devices in DND - LIKE THEY ARE WHEN YOU DIAL DND IN ASTERISK. Which was the only damn point of what I put.
I’m not a moron, I do understand the difference between presence and device status - which is why I said that for environments who believe a phone system is a phone system and if a phone sets DND this should be reflected by the BLF on monitoring phones.
Anyway, I’m done with this conversation… you definitely know far more than me - so how about helping with my thread where I have an actual, technical issue with FreePBX
That is incorrect. Nick sold all his holding 100% a couple months ago. Once he is below 10% he no longer has to report his holdings.
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Ahh, interesting. I didn’t know about the under 10% rule for the reporting. Thanks.
If you listen to the last quarertly call we had around minute 17 you will hear Bill our CEO mention that Nick has sold the last of his stock.
It is an interesting conversation. The way I see things is Asterisk is a good product I used for the first time in 2009 but was only using it as a conference bridge attached to my company’s NEC Proprietary digital, Analog and VoIP Ports added. Had I have been aware of Asterisk before getting the NEC I would have Never purchased the NEC as it was a disaster. Many features did not work as promised. My company was not integrating Phones of any kind at that time. But due to the issues with NEC It was part of my long-term goal to get into telephony. So here we are. New to Integrating telephony or these days VoIP is the most common term.
Since we were a specialized network company we did do some work on Texas A&M’s install of Asterisk in I think 07. Over 5k extensions with many of them analog phones.
We started studying the various solutions about 1 year ago. At that time 3CX was Windows Only. I certainly will NOT use a Windows-based PBX unless a customer insists on it and so far this has not happened. All systems will have some strong points and some weak areas. That is just a fact. But 3CX cost us a very large sale and a few smaller installs. We were given very wrong info by the Staff. I will not go into detail but I have zero tolerance for a few things they did. Maybe FreePBX is not perfect Nothing is. BUT I found good folks and had my eye on FreePBX and a couple other solutions. But FreePBX has the features we feel our customers will want. And Sangoma has some good looking solutions that were clearly well thought out to have what is needed and NOT overloaded with a bunch of stuff we do NOT need. Plus it looks Professional. This can be important for some clients. I do not wish badly on 3CX although I certainly could justify doing so.
On another note I am pleased there is an ARM based version of FreePBX as 1. I think ARM will at some point have a bigger role in PBXes at some future Point. 2. RISC chips are in my experience superior to CISC with this type of software. However, I personally will NOT use an experiment board such as the Raspberry Pi as a PBX server even as cool as they are. The CPU is fine but these are NOT commercial grade boards. I figure boards with a more reliable PCB Other than cell phones and Google chrome books will be available at some time and Sangoma will integrate one of them. They are great to play with though for now.
You folks are an interesting bunch and we look forward to working with you folks.
Jim
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