In defense of Sangoma/FreePBX, most (if not all) backup catastrophes were scenarios where users restored on a system that is not the same version as the backup was made on. Yes there are known issues like restoring by uploading through the GUI etc.
But I agree with the fact that a lot of things aren’t taken serious.
Google Voice stopped working more than a year ago, can someone explain why there wasn’t included in the next update a script to delete the module and delete all config files under /etc/asterisk ? Several users had issues because of this, and same goes to RMS and other modules that there’s currently ZERO use out of it.
There was a topic with close to 300 posts from the developers asking the community what they would like to see in FreePBX 15, I don’t think any of the suggestions posted made it into FPBX 15 besides Backup and the API which was mentioned in the introduction post.
Again, don’t get me wrong, the current version of FreePBX offers a ton of features, pretty stable, still open source which allows you to do integrations of your own.
But here’s the bothersome part, most commercial modules work great, but you can’t setup a PBX with commercial modules and charge from a client money and then have the commerical module crash.
We had this experience with VQPlus callback, it was heavily used and crashed randomly, initially Sangoma charged us credits because “configuration setup help is not included in commercial module support”… and after arguing with the tech that he didn’t guide us, made any frontend changes or something that’s documented in the wiki, they stopped charging us.
Then the tech stated that in order VQ Plus should run properly we should restart it very frequently, or try to upgrade to edge every time is crashes… What?
Finally after 4 months of back and forth they released a fix which is stable since mid June.
Same goes to UCP. It was beautifully rebuilt for FreePBX 14, but some features that were in 13 are gone, like entering a phone number and originating a call, clicking on placed calls to originate the call.
It’s 2019, I think UCP would be a solid product and people would ditch Softphones and use just UCP.
But currently, you gotta have big luck to get this UCP phone to work, and if you do get it to work you can’t transfer, conference or do similar basic phone tasks.
There’s no way users can have a shared contact list where they themselves can add contacts in UCP.
There’s no way users can share a fax number like you can do with Voicemail.
Yes, UCP is mainly working fine, but these few incomplete features are what’s holding back several admins from rolling UCP out to users for official use.
In other words, if we pay for something we expect it to work.
And if you guys are offering a paid version of UCP with the mentioned features (including Queue Wallboard) we’d very likely buy it today. Even a per user license.
You say zulu, zulu might be a solution, but the last time we installed it, it messed up FollowMe on the extensions that had Zulu, so I’d wait until it’s fully stable and then try installing it again.
To summarize: in our eyes things are taking very long, we didn’t see in the last I don’t know how long major development improvements, and there’s a lot of unfinished stuff which left us admins frustrated.
Again, the development team seem like very nice people, I personally got a lot of help from them here on the community, Lorne’s how to’s posts and knowledge are giving us better ideas everyday!
Perhaps there’s a lack of code contributers?