FreePBX Plans under new Stewardship

Taking over stewardship of such an important project is a very challenging and exciting opportunity. It doesn’t take the likes of Gartner or Yankee Group to measure how successful and wide spread FreePBX has flourished since its early days. Rob has lead the project through growing pains and infrastructure challenges and I’m sure as we move forward, the infectious nature of this great project will insure he never strays far. Thank you for all you have done during your stewardship!

With well over a million downloads though the multiple channels of distribution FreePBX enjoys, it has graduated into a world class business critical project and I plan to continue its evolution in this direction. My involvement started in the days of AMP prior to its name change in early 2006. Since then I have been actively involved in the management of the project along side with Rob and other key contributors.

Over the next several weeks I will communicate the plans and roadmap I would like to lead FreePBX through. There’s a lot to do so I will keep this message brief and highlight some of the areas of initial focus.
The first one, on a lot of people’s minds, is the FreePBX 2.3 Beta that is now imminent. We will be rolling this out in the next couple of days now that we have the FreePBX 2.2.2 maintenance release behind us. I will follow-up with a more detailed communication describing what this new release is all about and the various features and functionality it will bring.
Another area of focus is giving our website a face lift and in doing so, consolidating all the FreePBX information that is scattered around different sites and across multiple disjoint web applications. This is something we started back when the Forums were getting heavily spammed. With that problem well behind us, we are taking it to the next level.
The third big thing on my mind is a tightly integrated provisioning system, or End Point Manager as some have called it. This is an area where we have put significant thought and once the 2.3 Beta Program gets rolling, we will put a lot of focus in this space so keep your eyes peeled.
As a celebration gift for this new management change I threw together a long requested module that has been sought after since as long as I have been paying attention to the forums and chat rooms. If you take a peek at the FreePBX 2.3 module repository, you will notice a new module called daynight, otherwise known as that Day/Night Control feature code that lets you hit happy hour early on those slow Friday afternoons. Enjoy!
– Philippe