If you have already heard about the Magic Button, read on because the feature set has expanded by a factor of five. This post is to inform the community about the upcoming community release of the Magic Button software, as well as the upcoming availability of the new LumenVox Community Speech Licensing Server.

The SANGOMA discount codes were well received by some lucky participants last week and expired along with the Early Bird Specials on Friday. However, we have some more opportunities if you’ve been procrastinating or have been looking for something a little different. With the introduction of our two new registration options, Sangoma has asked to sponsor two more discount coupons which are now live!

Sponsorships

As you read this post please notice the new Corporate Sponsorship column we have added to help support the further development of this great project. There are many of you who benefit from FreePBX for your business or sell systems to your customers.

For those of you who have given or continue to provide us support though buttons like this:

we are always appreciative. To augment this, we have provided premium space on our site to recognize and encourage Corporate Sponsors to provide support on an ongoing basis. We are thrilled and grateful to announce our first Sponsor, Sangoma Technologies Inc., the premium provider of universal telephony cards for superior voice quality. (Because it must work!) If you are interested in sponsorship information, please send me (p_lindheimer) a private message or email to info at freepbx dot org. We are looking forward to enrolling more sponsors to help accelerate the growth of FreePBX.

Scholarships

For those of you who have been keeping your eyes on the May Open Telephony Training Seminar, wondering if vendors would offer scholarship coupons as occurred in our last training, your wishes have come true! In addition to Sangoma’s above mentioned sponsorship, they really liked what they saw the first time around and are back to provide 2 Scholarships for a savings of $500 for our Las Vegas, Nevada training in May. These coupon codes will work on the Standard and Extended registrations. But the catch is, these will expire in one week, Friday, April 2nd, if they aren’t taken up in the next few days! Don’t procrastinate because these scholarships were snatched up in the first day or two last time around. Use coupon code SANGOMA when registering to receive these deals.

In addition to these scholarships, there are still some registration + hotel specials available. We have managed to negotiate some additional rooms and the hotel has worked with us to keep the rates a little longer so we still have a few of these available but they won’t last long. If you are thinking of coming, don’t wait until they disappear. The SANGOMA code won’t work on these, but SANGOMAHOTEL will give you an extra $200 off of these great specials for the first two lucky registrants!

For now, we give our thanks to Sangoma and the rest of you who have provided contributions to this great project!

Philippe – On behalf of the FreePBX team

I blogged last week about the Las Vegas plans for the next training event while our training site was still being remodeled for the Las Vegas show. We were thrilled to see that the slight disarray did not keep some dedicated will be attendees from jumping on the great Early Bird deal we put together that included 4 hotel nights.

More Training Updates

We know not all of you need the first "Day 0" of the event and we've had inquiries about similar deals for the Standard 3 day registration. We've been busy with the hotel working out some arrangements and are excited to announce several new options that will be available for a VERY LIMITED time. Good through NEXT Friday, March 21 (or while supplies last) we will include 3 hotel nights as part of the registration package for the Standard 3 Day Registration, for only $55 more! That's in addition to the Extended 4 Day Registration that includes 4 hotel nights for just $100 more! We've also been asked about staying the weekend to have a little Las Vegas fun after the event. So for either registration type, for just $375 more you can include the weekend as part of the registration, double occupancy, so bring your significant other if you would like! (If you've already signed up and want to take advantage of any of these new offerings, contact us and we will work with you.)

Why are these only good until next Friday, you ask? If you've ever done business with these Vegas Hotels, unless you are ready to make hard commitments to take up huge portions of their hotel space, it's a bit like getting airline ticket prices which change minute to minute. We'll keep working with them but are at their mercy so for now, take advantage of these rates while we have them and while supplies last for each type.

You can see many of the testimonials that we received and get details on the website about the upcoming training. You can also hear an interview on Robert Keller’s (aka cosmicwombat) The VoIP Experience audio blog going over last month’s event.

So if you didn’t get a chance to make it out to Charleston or it was too far to fly and Las Vegas is closer to home, we'd love to see you at this next training which is sure to be another great success and a chance to gain many valuable technical, marketing and sales insights with this great product!

Here are the details:

When:	May 21-23, 2008 (and an optional “Day 0” on May 20th)
Where:	Newly Renovated Golden Nugget in Downtown Las Vegas, NV
Contact:	training at freepbx dot org or 1-877-480-9533
Register:	Click Here to Register

Release News

We released versions 2.4.0 on February 10th after seeing over 1300 very successful beta sites and what appeard to be record stability during the beta program. We also did another first and introduced a “2.3 to 2.4 Upgrade Tool” module to circumvent the need of downloading the new tarball as had always been required in previous major version upgrades. That has resulted in an overnight success as we have seen almost 7000 systems upgraded through this tool. Even more exciting, in just one month we already have over 11,000 2.4.0 installs which sets quite a precedence on adoption rate for a major release. If you’ve been waiting for others to upgrade first and test the waters, this should reassure you that there is no reason hold back any longer!

What's Coming Next?

There are a few key area that we would like to put more focus into and there’s just never enough hours in a day to do everything we would like. If you’ve been following some of the activities you have probably heard of Ethan’s early work going on in the voice recognition space around the Company Directory technology which we want to integrate into FreePBX or the Magic Button that has been discussed in various places.

Another exciting area is closer integration of XML phone applications into FreePBX since the capabilities and availability of these very promising phones has really matured over the last year or so, and is only getting better. Having such rich applications that expose useful features to end users is a real selling point when competing against the the traditional telco providers. A feature is useless to most end users if there is no button associated with it to provide easy operation. This, and more is what these applications bring us and a closer integration with FreePBX is where we want to drive to.

Better End Point Management and Provisioning has been on our list for a long time and we’d like to dust off some of the work that was started last summer and see about revising this and really getting it going.

These represent a few important areas that we want to see more focus on. The challenge is finding the time and as many of you know, there is no outside funding or resources other than a few of us dedicated developers and the small contributions that make their way into the project. It is more than a full time job just to run this project and although we manage to bring in some income from sources such as support and professional services and the training program, these very activities take away from the time we would love to be developing the projects just mentioned. One thing that helps take a bit of the edge off is generous donations that are always appreciated.

We are always willing to move your favorite project to the top of the list if it is something that you would like to fund to make happen sooner rather than waiting until someone eventually gets to it. So your support is always appreciated in any of these ways as we would love to see more effort applied to these projects and other areas that are in need of further development.

Philippe on behalf of the FreePBX Team!

We are back in the saddle after last week in Charleston still glowing in the success and super feedback we got from our first Open Telephony Training Seminar. We couldn’t have been more please with the large turnout from so many attendees and vendors and putting faces to the forum names was very enjoyable.

There were too many great testimonials written on the class surveys to list them all but here are a few in addition to the forum thread:

FreePBX 2.4.0 Looking Great

It has been about a week since FreePBX 2.4.0 went final and we already have over 3000 installations running, of which over 2200 of them have successfully upgraded with the new 2.3 to 2.4 upgrade module that was published just 5 days ago. (Not counting the hundreds of 2.4 rc1 and beta systems which have not yet upgraded but some of which are probably active.) Given the almost deadening silence in the bug tracker, we might mark this as the most successful new release to date!

For those of you wondering what we are seeing in terms of Asterisk versions these days, on 2.4 installations it is just about 70% Asterisk 1.4 and 30% 1.2, and of course those few systems living on the edge beta testing 1.6 for the community.

If you are running version 2.3 you can press the button below to purchase your guilt free upgrade pass to benefit from all our hard labor in making this upgrade so easy and so successful for you!

Open Telephony Training Seminar – West Coast

With our first training class sold out and just a week away we have gotten inquiries asking when and where our next training event will be. We are currently in discussions to see if we can bring you the next event in Las Vegas, NV the week of April 8th, 2008 which is coming up quick. We are looking at this location to help those on the West Coast who did not want to come clear across the country to Charleston. Las Vegas also has the benefit of low cost airfair and the availability of very reasonable hotel rates. Whether you end up winning the cost of your training at the craps table we can not say but from what we’ve heard from some of you, this would be a good location.

Please reply to this thread if you are considering coming and let us know if this works for you. We are always open to hearing what might work – but if we are to get this next one scheduled soon we need to move quickly!

Philippe on behalf of the FreePBX Team!

This year is starting out with a real bang for the FreePBX team as we once again come to you with a lot of great enhancements and features on the new 2.4.0 Final Release. It has been an exciting beta program that we officially launched 9 weeks ago and has been tested by over 1300 systems with fantastic feedback from our community.

The list of features, enhancements and bug fixes (most bugs from version 2.3 and prior) is much to long to share with you here but some highlights include:

• Simultaneous support for Asterisk version 1.2, 1.4 and 1.6 (best effort for 1.6 as it is still in beta)
• New Voicemail Blast Group Module
• New Language Module
• Vast improvements and many feature enhancements to Paging and Intercom Module
• Internal improvements and several new features to Queues Module
• DUNDi™ Trunk support with automatic dialplan integration
• Vast improvements to handle Zap Channel Inbound routing and incorporating Zap Channel + CID routing abilities
• System wide extension and destination registry and automatic conflict and integrity detection
• New Custom Apps module to integrate custom applications and extensions into the above registries
• Vast improvements to Devices and Users mode especially around adhoc devices
Call Confirmation support for hunt ring strategy in Ring Groups and Follow-Me

And the list goes on! Despite the many new features introduced, there has been a focus on building capabilities to help the administrator maintain internal integrity and detect issues when they occur. This effort started back in version 2.3 when we introduced the Notification Panel in the System Status Dashboard and continues to evolve as we report on more error conditions, and as we introduce more mechanisms such as the Extension and Destination registries and internal integrity checking ability as mentioned above.

So how do you get 2.4.0 onto your system when we told you that you would be able to upgrade your 2.3 systems from Module Admin? After spending all day yesterday writing and testing the upgrade module that will enable this, my family informs me that I will be taking them out to a really expensive restaurant for abandoning them (and not just yesterday!) so I’m holding it up for ransom. Once enough people use the following button we’ll get it out!

Seriously though … the donations will be much appreciated but the Update Module is on its way and will be published and available on 2.3 systems within a few days. We are delaying it just briefly for two reasons. We are monitoring the conversion rate of 2.4 beta test sites to the final release to make sure there are no issues reported in the last bug fixes that got rolled in since RC1 was released. We are also asking some of the community to beta test the upgrade module to make sure it functions smoothly when we publish it. You can get information in this forum post if you would like to help.

You can also go the traditional route to either upgrade or build new installs by using the standard install and upgrade processes listed in our site's Upgrade Instructions.

If you’ve been following the other activities happening here at FreePBX then you probably did not miss the Open Telephony Training Seminar we have been talking about. We are thrilled at the response we have gotten on this upcoming event which has now completely SOLD OUT more than two weeks before its start date! These lucky participants will be the first to receive formal training based on the 2.4.0 release announced today, including many internal capabilities not always exposed in the GUI interface. We have had many inquiries from would be participants who could not make those dates or were looking for something a little closer to their homes and we are happy to say that we will soon be choosing and organizing the next event to accommodate those requests.

 

With the current training being held in Charleston, South Carolina it is only natural to plan the next event on the other Coast. We have not made any choices but are considering locations like Las Vegas (or just outside to keep the distractions during the event down a bit) or San Diego but we want to hear from you both where and when we should hold this. So feel free to reply and give your feedback to if you are hoping to attend one of our next sessions!

For now, go check out the new 2.4.0 Release and if you like what you see, or want to get the 2.3 to 2.4 Upgrade module out quicker, go press that donate button above to show your support and appreciation for all the great work and hundreds of volunteer hours that have gone into bringing you this new version!

Philippe on behalf of the FreePBX Team!

Along with requests for the Asterisk Voice Recognition "Magic Button", I have had numerous requests over the last couple days for the Asterisk Voice Recognition Company Directory (AVRCD). As promised before, I am releasing the source for the company directory. Drop to the bottom for links to a demo and all the source files for the Company Directory or keep reading for details.

What winners and why didn’t I hear about this? Before going there, we have an important announcement concerning the upcoming training. If you were holding out until the last minute, don't skip the next section.

Registration Closes Friday