We have two open cases right now. In the first, after an hours-long marathon with a senior support engineer, he said the two issues appeared to be bugs and that he’d look into them and get back. Two weeks later we’re told he’s left the company and a “Manager will contact you Monday”. That Monday was a week ago. It’s been crickets.
In the other, we specifically stated when opening the ticket that we don’t allow unattended remote access to the system and so we’d need to schedule a time for attended remote access. That resulted in an email telling us that unattended remote access is not setup with directions to enable it. I repeated the request to schedule a time for attended access and five business days later we get an email telling us to do packet captures and send them in along with Asterisk logs.
Buying support is EXPENSIVE. When we do that it’s because we are stuck and it’s urgent. Going in circles like this is frustrating, expensive, and frankly, frightening. If either of these was causing a system down issue…the system would have been down for weeks (nearly two months in one case).
This didn’t use to be how FreePBX paid support worked. Expensive, with annoying expiring support time credits, yes, but we got competent engineers engaged in solving problems, and the problems got solved (frustrations with code defects are another story).
How do we get fast, effective, responsive, secure support?? What we’re experiencing just isn’t good enough.
This is a common theme lately. With the resignations and layoffs that the North America support team has seen I am not sure there is anyone left on the FreePBX/PBXact side in North America anymore. They recently let go of the VP who’s been overseeing support for 10 years that I originally hired back in the Schmooze days.
One of the cases was closed after ignoring multiple requests for a scheduled support session on the system. Nothing was done to actually solve the problem.
“Call me and we will coordinate to get you into the system.” was responded to with “collect a bunch of logs and send them”.
Seems anyone having issues with getting support should just start posting here to get Lorne’s attention as it seems to be the only way to get things resolved lately for users.
I only open tickets when I need a refund, Sangoma Talk renew is buggy sometimes, otherwise making a new thread or looking in the forum always solved my problems.
I’m thinking my supervisor’s concerns are getting more valid everyday. We had been experimenting with FreePBX since March 2022, hoping to move away from our Alcatel PBX, which is horrible to try to configure and deal with support on. But a couple weeks ago, he said it’s been put on hold (clarifying that it’s not a dead project, just on hold), mostly because he’s heard support for FreePBX can sometimes be bad (we had visited another school district back in January that is on FreePBX, though a much smaller district than us, and they mentioned some support issues). The hold will probably be for a while - just signed a year-long contract with Alcatel for the continued use and support of their PBX.
I really like FreePBX, there’s so much customization I’ve been able to do where in the Alcatel system, there is zero I can do on my own. So I’m hoping support improves sometime down the road because even relying on the community forums, as great as they are, isn’t the best for when there’s an immediate, “system down” issue.
Call this morning from support on the new case I opened to replace the case was closed without anything having been done. In broken English I was, again, asked to enable unattended remote access to the system. Hard no. Told the person we’d have to schedule an attended support session.
There are plenty of other organizations that can provide you with quality paid support on FreePBX. The folks at crosstalk solutions come to mind. https://www.crosstalksolutions.com/
For large organizations my company Clearly IP also provides custom support packages for FreePBX.
I might have to look into them more. I know I really get good information from Chris’ videos on YouTube. With our set up, we want FreePBX on a VM (as most of our other physical servers have been migrated to Hyper-V). I see they sell physical appliances, but guessing they might support a VM environment?
Otherwise if you are a larger organization as mentioned we do offer enterprise support contracts but we don’t offer pay as you go hourly support or anything like that.
Not sure if better to discuss in messages, but I’d be interested in getting some ideas at least. Even if nothing happens for a year, an idea would be good. We are a school district with 30+ buildings and 2,000+ desk phones (no softphones, though a couple of us here in the IT department would appreciate).
We run it in Hyper-V in many places. Years ago Tony himself told me this wasn’t supported ,but it works just fine. Very handy for snapshoting before version upgrades.
,but it works just fine. Very handy for snapshoting before version upgrades.