Keeping the Community Excited

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I am probably not the only community member wondering what the gang at Sangoma is up to with FreePBX and the Sangoma products. The silence is defining. From my point of view, it is a missed opportunity to keep up the excitement of the FreePBX faithful.

Questions like “what are the current priorities”, “what improvements to the current platform are desired as time permits”, “what are the short term and long term road maps to the future in general terms”? What is happening with Asterisk which will impact FreePBX? What is Sangoma’s view of where the voip/communications solutions are headed?

If readers of this agree, please post your encouragement as well.

Thanks

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This?

https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FOP/Roadmap

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Here is the Asterisk roadmap as well.

https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Roadmap

There is a lot of documentation out there.

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We did post an update in January, FreePBX 15: Feedback Wanted! | FreePBX - Let Freedom Ring

Starting in version 15+, you will now be able to take a backup and restore it to any future FreePBX version. To do this, each and every module will control its own backup and restore process, telling the system what files and data it needs to backup. This led us down the path of breaking out the ability to have different places to store your backups into its own module which we plan to further expand on in the future. Currently, this allows for backups to be stored and restored from your usual places such as Email, FTP, Local storage and on another system via SSH. By abstracting backup and restore into smaller pieces, it will allow us to be able to better test and maintain each piece while still being able to look to the future of how you are using your phone system.

The second thing we’ve heard from you is that many of you would like an easier way to configure FreePBX, from your own applications. With that we plan on bringing a GraphQL API to FreePBX, making it easier to do more with your PBX as well as help you build custom applications.

This required us to go and touch all 130+ modules that are currently in the system so it was quite an undertaking. Backup is just now starting to come together

As for API only about 10 modules have been done out of the 130. Why? Designing a whole authentication system (using oauth2) and utilizing new technologies like GraphQL and figuring out how to implement them into FreePBX are beyond complex.

Both backup&restore and the API took far longer than we anticipated. So this ended up turning into a “13” release all over again (taking a long time to complete)

Finishing Backup & Restore and API in FreePBX 15

Not sure how to answer this exactly. We have a team of 7 working on FreePBX. We are trying to close bugs that have been outstanding over the last couple of years, specifically in Endpoint.

Here’s some fancy graphs showing you the ticket progress we’ve done over the last 60 days

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I dont know how to answer this? How do you give a road map in general terms? All FreePBX roadmaps are here: Sangoma Documentation

They added video about a year ago. But nothing major is affecting FreePBX that Asterisk has done. We have a close relationship with them and go to Astricon every year and participate in their developer conferences to learn what new features they added and work with the community on direction. Last year they added SFU video to Asterisk and released Asterisk 15 as a non-LTS release. This October at Astricon they will probably release Asterisk 16. Not sure if it’ll be LTS or not. Either way it doesn’t impact FreePBX too much

Our marketing blogs answer this question pretty well. UC is the way of the future and we think we have a good product in Zulu, especially as we try to improve upon it and make it better.

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What a complete answer. Congratulations!

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They are keeping me excited by fixing bugs that are haunting me and updating EPM since we use it all the time.

New stuff < Fixing existing things we are reliant on.

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Agreed, although balancing it with new features, like queue wallboard, make the platform more complete and ultimately an easier sell.

https://wiki.freepbx.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=100928970

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and someday we will release that. Someday.

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I will say somewhat cynically that for people who’s job it is to bother my cell phone with rubbish calls for furnace maintenance and other such dreck, well that is where the money is in telephony these days and Sangoma has to go there if they want to keep food on the table that’s what Zulu is all about. For that crowd that’s where the excitement is. For the rest of us, it’s just a phone system and it’s pretty darn complete - what else could anyone want who just needs a good phone system? It would be nice to have an integrated voice-to-email module but that capability is available if you want to roll it yourself.

There is such a thing as if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. As Mt Scott said “the more they overengineer the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain”

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Thanks for the great response. The detail documentation sites are great and beyond that I was just hungering for a periodic human friendly summary much like you provided.

I recommend a quarterly reminder on someone’s calendar to chat up the faithful with the major info along the line of my example questions.

Thanks.

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We did regular webinars for Sangoma partners where we talk alot about this stuff. The one caveat is as a public company we can’t talk much about things we are working on or plans for the future.

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Sure you can, just get some guidelines from your legal folks to know where the land mines are. Public companies, not counting Apple, do it all the time regarding their products as opposed to any major announcements which might impact their performance and securities in a big way.
As was said earlier, much of the details are on-line, a quarterly update giving the glossy human consumable overview with a “from the front lines” twist would be just a nice way of connecting, often referred to as marketing even though some aspects of the the product is free. :sun_with_face:

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Unfortunately our policy and because of the size of our company being so small its not that easy for us and not something they would ever approve but feel free to reach out to the investor relations contact at sangoma.com if you feel you know better the laws and requirements of the TSX and Security law.

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It would be very interesting know more about the reason that have motivated the topic of this discussion.

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@tonyclewis considering all the module updates we get I’m amazed you only have a team of 7 working on FreePBX! Do you guys ever sleep??

Thanks for all the hard work you guys put in.

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We will sleep when we are dead… Maybe not even then…

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