Happy New Years to Everyone!
The year of 2007 was a great year for this wonderful project and we want to start the New Year by reflecting back on the super progress we achieved. We love this user community and hope you will take a few moments to look back with us!
FreePBX Offers their first Open Telephony Training Seminar
Last week we announced our first Open Telephony Training Seminar
focused 100% on the FreePBX/Asterisk market. After much demand from
many users including past FtOCC attendees (from the trixbox community) we are offering this class.
We have designed it to both complement and supplement the training
opportunities you can receive from other programs but aimed at
those focused 100% on Asterisk/FreePBX based solutions and looking for the
additional depth that the Development Team and Successful Volume
Resellers can offer. As an added bonus, *the* one and only Ward Mundy
from Nerd Vittles will be there to host it with us!
We encourage you to take a look and for a LIMITED NUMBER OF SEATS we are offering an early-bird discount so act quick to get the discounted seats that are available before the prices go up:
FreePBX Beta Programs
Our most recent beta program for FreePBX 2.4 was officially launched
just a couple of weeks ago and so far the feedback is proving to keep
up with our tradition of improved features and stability with each new
release. There are lots of great enhancements that you can read about
in our post.
This new release follows the highly successful FreePBX version 2.3 release that we launched last summer where we introduced many new features and capabilities in addition to the first support for Asterisk 1.4.
These releases continue our philosophy to offer about 2 main releases per year, to focus on improved stability and many bug fixes with each new release while continuing to work through the countless feature and enhancement requests that continually poor in from our loyal installed base, many of whom are you trixbox CE users who we love!
FreePBX New Web Site
In addition to the efforts spent launching FreePBX 2.3.0 we
simultaneously launched this new website which integrated the many parts
that previously made up our FreePBX.org website
into a cohesive Content Management System. The effort tied together our
Forums, News bulletins, Development Trac site and the FreePBX
Application itself into a cohesive, single-sign-on environment to
further serve your needs. (If you never tried it, click on the Help tab
in FreePBX on version 2.3.0 or later and you will be presented with
context sensitive help information on our main site).
New Stewardship
Many of you may have known Rob Thomas as the previous Steward for the
FreePBX project. As Rob's demands on his time became taxed with other
obligations we chose to pass the baton and have Philippe (me) take over the project
to make sure it continued to receive the attention it deserved. It was
a great honor and has been a tremendous amount of work to bring us
along from where we were to where we have come. We hope that we are
meeting and exceeding your expectations!
In an effort to justify the thousands of hours of donated time that it takes to run this project, we are establishing means help fund it. There are always donations that are welcome and appreciated but the generosity of the user base is not enough to sustain the level of professional development and project management that we hope you have benefited from with FreePBX. None the less, we welcome those donations and while you are in the New Years Spirit, why not show your support now:
Since we don't have the venture capital funds as some other organizations have to pay salaries and we receive no financial support from major companies who base their business on our project, we hope you will take advantage of the services we offer. We provide Support Options that can not only help with common FreePBX/Asterisk/Linux support issues but can go into the depth of professional services, bug fixes, project management and more that you can expect to receive from the talent that brings you and develops FreePBX. And for the New Years, we have discounted the 5 and 10 hour support blocks so take advantage of our bulk pricing. We also offer the Open Telephony Training Seminar as an opportunity for those of you who want to enhance your skills, get the inside track and better learn how to benefit and profit from this great product!
Summary
We want to re-emphasize how honored we are that there are so many users
and businesses who have come to depend on our product as the basis of
their businesses whether to run their telephone systems or provide
telephone service to others. And for all of you hobbyist and home users
who just like to complicate your lives while having too much fun doing
it (and probably creating a bit of stress for your significant other)
we love you too! We made a toast to our installed base this
past New Years Eve and hope you were thinking of us as well!
Happy Holidays and have a Great New Years!
Philippe - on behalf of the FreePBX Team