I haven’t administered PBXact, but I’m wondering if auto-updates are by default configured to be enabled. And the admin has the ability to disable that behavior if need be. I realize you have said you’re not a dedicated IT person to the nth degree, but one thing I at least observe is never allowing any servers to just auto-update unattended. It’s always better to manually update, after reviewing release change logs, reading up for any regressions and bugs that might come along for the ride, etc. Otherwise coming into work one day and finding some restless natives can be a surprise.
I’m not speaking to the fairness of the situation you wound up in. Just pointing out ways to avoid other pitfalls when it comes to maintaining servers over a course of time.
I’m not sure how you acquired your PBXact system, but let me put it simply, you were misinformed if you were told you paid once and then got to use it for 25 years. That is never the way it worked. PBXact doesn’t license by individual modules. You get the whole package that includes PBX, certain number of endpoints licensed and a large collection of the closed-source modules, for an upfront payment and then annual maintenance.
Sorry you feel cheated, but this is not a money grab by Sangoma, it’s how it’s always worked, and frankly the annual maintenance is cheap for all you get. If you don’t need it all or don’t want to pay the annual maintenance then FreePBX is a better choice, and the good news is it is easy to take a backup from PBXact and restore it to a FreePBX.
I purchased an appliance online. And no one explicitly told me this, although what you’re claiming is technically not correct. It has been mentioned several times that the 25 year license does mean that you get to use it for 25 years. That’s pretty much the definition.
What is not included is upgrades to those modules for the entire 25 years. No, I don’t believe anyone actually told me that, and quite frankly I don’t remember that long ago to really know if I fully understood or did not.
I’ve fully admitted my faults and lapse in understanding and attention here, but what you’re claiming isn’t technically true.
That’s really only slightly relevant to my case (specifically to the Zulu portion) here. I bought the 25 year license under the premise that well before that I’d stop needing that and have moved onto newer products.
I agree that the yearly maintenance is pretty cheap. But to claim that this is “how it’s always worked” is, quite frankly, flat out untrue.
Maybe what you meant was that this was the way it was always supposed to work? That would have been a true statement. But this is certainly not the way that it has always worked.
If this was the way that it always worked, then I wouldn’t be in this situation, nor would anyone else. I shouldn’t have been able to accidentally update to an unsupported module, whether manually or automatically. IF that was the way this was going to be set up, a reasonable expectation would throw a flag right after that update happened.
This would have been very easy to manage if I were one version out and I could roll back and then decide best path forward. Under the circumstances, I’m fairly confident that there was zero solution other than paying a big chunk of money.
And a “Support Contract” that doesn’t actually include any support should not be called that. It’s a maintenance contract, and I’ve never run into any SaaS product before that forces you to pay for intermediate years if you didn’t have an active contract then. There is no reasonable case for that other than boosting revenue.
The other conversations I have seen here about 25-year licenses have all been about FreePBX commercial modules, not PBXact. I sell PBXact and I work with those clients to renew their maintenance each year. If that is actually optional, I did not know about it. I do know that I get numerous emails from Sangoma as the renewal time approaches.
What would the licensing difference between FreePBX Commercial Module 25-year license and PBXact including 25-year licenses for Commercial Modules be?
Penguinpbx replied earlier in this thread: “You can continue to use the 25-year licensed modules at the last version which you paid for access to – so that seems like forever/perpetual for many people – and it has been this way for a while, including the POMPs requirement for updates on PBXact:”
I’m sure now that I’ve got a contract (eight years worth of contract to last me just barely 10 months!) I’ll be getting those emails with Sangoma wanting more money.
The module you mentioned above was softphones which is not 25-year. It is an annual renewal. At 4 softphones it is $19 x 4 annually = $76. If instead you keep renewing your PBXact annually at $75 for the Bronze (updates-only) maintenance, you save a dollar and can still add more softphones up to the endpoint limit of a PBXact 25.
I’m not positive if I inserted the photo correctly, but if I did then hopefully you can very clearly see that despite being told multiple times throughout all this that there never was a 25-year license for softphones, I do indeed still have a valid 25-year license for Zulu, which was the original softphone app that came with PBXact and was replaced by SangomaConnect.
Again, as I mentioned, the yearly cost is not really what has me and others so annoyed, it’s the manner in which all this was handled where it shows that not breaking customer’s systems was apparently no part of this decision making process.
Initially, I was a bit surprised that there seemed to be not even a remote admission in this or other threads that I’ve seen that anyone remotely affiliated with Sangoma was willing to admit that any poor judgement was made. Even a simple “this could have been handled better, this was not our intent” would go a long way at least for me personally. But instead I just continually saw what appeared to be the complete lack of acknowledgement that these recent changes would have any appreciable impact to a customer about which they might even be inconvenienced.
I’m starting to think more though that there’s a prevailing lack of understanding entirely about the product and license offerings and that Sangoma, at least as far as it is represented in the forum and anywhere else there has been an official or semi-official response, genuinely has no clue what impact years of poor management and then abrupt policy changes and switches being flipped on their end will have on their customers.
That’s possibly more dismaying than if someone flat out admitted that they wanted to boost short term cash flow.
I’ll have to search back through other threads from a few months ago I found with similar themes, but the general feeling I’m getting is that Sangoma doesn’t really seem to understand what’s going on at all.
Agreed, there’s room for improvement, and hopefully the earlier post came across that way, as it was an attempt to make some improvement by pointing back to forum posts/policies which addressed these topics from nearly a decade ago – in that vein, here’s another:
Also, the current version of the PBXact Brochure, released last year, does have details about POMPs on page 14 – see bottom left corner of the PBXact Appliances page for the PDF brochure link and more information.
by pointing back to forum posts/policies which addressed these topics from nearly a decade ago – in that vein, here’s another: