Thanks to Last Week's Class, Back to Business - 2.10

For those of you who were able to join us, we had another great class and gathering in Cleveland, OH at last week's [url=/open-telephony-training-seminar]Open Telephony Training Seminar (OTTS)[/url]. SkyKingOH, Owner of Micro Advantage in Cleveland, OH, generously hosted our event this time helping with all sorts of logistics, finding a great facility and generally assuring that we were able to have another excellent event for roughly 30 attendees who were able to make it. For those of you on the waiting list, we are already working on coming up with the next venue so hang tight!

As is always the case, we had lots of great class time and labs to make sure that there were no functional brain cells left by the end of the three day event!

Those that couldn’t be disabled by technical saturation we worked on with proper good old fashion after class networking that is always so beneficial for all involved! I must say that we experienced some pretty interesting phenomena by the last day. After watching some of the more hard core ‘technologists’ play Angry Birds on our large flat panel TV in the suite (yes, they apparently regularly carry with them the required cables to do this), we encountered the real deal on our way to dinner:
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Shot by Tony on our way to Sushi Thursday night
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Unfortunately I had a 9:00AM flight out the next morning as I missed out on the real fun when SkyKingOH (yes, there is something in that name) took Tony (both avid pilots) up in Skyking1, his company Cessna 210 Turbo, to try and track down the previous night’s Angry Bird phenomena!

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That’s Tony standing by the plane and then in the cockpit on his first outing in a Turbo Prop
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I don’t believe they ever found it but you can see more about it at the sight where our photo’s eventually made it.

Well this will be a hard one to beat but we’ll let you know as soon as we have the next class planned and will try to see if we can top this last experience!

So what’s going on with these releases! Well I’ll admit I did a bit of a stealth final release on 2.9 since I have yet to officially announce it but it has in fact been released and if you’ve been updating through Module Admin then you will have seen it go final for a couple of weeks now and with over 7000 systems running 2.9, I would venture to say it’s looking quite good! WIth that behind us, it’s time to start gearing up for 2.10!

On the Distro front, it has still technically been in Beta though all feedback continues to re-inforce that it’s about the most stable FreePBX based Distro available in the market! The team is working right now to role it into an officially endorsed final release so stayed tuned as it’s on its way any day!

What’s the plan on 2.10 as we have a list of both features and major architectural changes that we want to do that probably incorporates over a year of work if we tried to do it all at once! You can see what’s on the Current 2.10 Milestone and all the ideas we are trying to accomplish. It includes everything form a new User Portal (ARI) to attacking a better and more fine grained call recording redesign to replacements for the CDR reporting engine (complete with a desire to include Call Event Logging, CEL) and other supported alternatives to replace FOP! All that and more, and that doesn’t even begin to start going into the actual feature requests! Bottom line, we’re going to have to make some tough decisions because at this point most of us believe that this next release cycle should be closer to about 4 months vs. the fairly lengthy cycle we just went through on 2.9.

So … as always, we want to hear from you! As developers and project sponsors we have our list of priorities that we plan on working on. However, we always want to hear your ideas and input to make sure what comes out is well rounded and hits a broad section of the user base! Whether those suggestions are geared at the FreePBX Distro level or generic 2.10 ideas and enhancements, it’s all great info to feedback to us. So … please bring it on here, or in the forums and tickets, and we’ll be back to keep you updated on what is going on!

Philippe - On behalf of the FreePBX Team and the OTTS team!

It was a pleasure to meet everyone and see the crew in Cleveland. I look forward to hosting again.

Looking forward to making the next one…Maybe the Flood waters here in Vicksburg will be down!

Bill

I hope the dude in the car didn’t mind being pictured driving whilst on the phone. Although I have been known to use a shaver and an electric toothbrush in mine.