I'm excited to announce FreePBX 2.7 Final available for immediate download. We have over 2000 systems running 2.7 at the time of this posting and continue to see more features and increased stability as FreePBX evolves. The bugs encountered during this release were minimal and most of those addressed in the bug tracker were already existing bugs from earlier releases fixed during this Milestone (and most of those not back ported to 2.6.
The biggest changes in 2.7 were around the Fax handling and the new FAX module which provides a much more intuitive GUI for dealing with FAXes with both shared voice/FAX DIDs that require detection or dedicated FAX DIDs. It also introduced support for FAX For Asterisk (FFA) in addition to the legacy support for spanddsp based FAX reception. You can get more details about the changes in the 2.7.0 Beta1 Release announcement.
Outside of FAX, you can see a more comprehensive list of features and bugs addressed as well as an overall summary in the 2.7 Milestone along with direct links and stats to all 142 closed Feature Request and Bug tickets addressed during this run!
A few highlights include some great enhancements to Queues and Backup, as well as additional abilities in Outbound Routes, Follow Me, Ring Groups, Trunks and Conferences to name just a few. If you are particularly interested in Queues you may want to have a look at the recent Heavy Queue Usage in FreePBX Technical Corner article we just put out which talks about various advanced capabilities in the Queue module that may be of interest.
With 2.7 now final it means that FreePBX 2.5 is now off support so if you are still running 2.5 or older versions, you may want to seriously think about an upgrade plan. The project's support policy is to support the current and previous major releases.
We have started to compile up a list of what we want to target for our next v2 release and you can see the plans as they evolve in the 2.8 Milestone. More to come on that as we better define it. We will also be working hard to get our v3 General Preview Release Candidate out with support for both Asterisk and FreeSWITCH. It has been available as a Developer release since last August and is now getting to the point where we will be able to get more user feedback to really shape its development going forward!
For now go have fun with all the great new stuff we are getting out to all of you and we will be back shortly with more news to come!
Philippe - On behalf of the FreePBX Team!