Have you tried Pro yet? If not why?
Submitted by kerryg on Fri, 01/11/2008 - 4:49pm.
Now that Pro has been out for a few months I want to take an informal survey to see what objections people have that have not at least downloaded and checked out trixbox Pro. Even though I am the "CE Guy" I am personally a huge fan of Pro for my clients because it simplifies the sale process with a really well defined set of features. Some of the common things I hear from CE people are:
* It costs money
If you are totally opposed to spending any money at all then Pro is not for you
* Hybrid Hosted Architecture
How many of us use GMail? Instant Messaging? Salesforce? Voip providers? Relying on an internet connection only when you need to make changes isn't a really strong argument, but this is a pain point for some people.
* Limited VOIP providers
This was changed recently so all versions have unlimited voip providers now
* virtual Extensions eat a license
This was changed recently so that virtual extensions do not use a license
* Limited Features
it may not have every feature that CE has, but the features that it does have work VERY well.
* Phone provisioning is difficult
Aastra and Polycom phones use fully automatic provisioning now, plug them into your network and they attach and create a new extension automatically.
If you have some reasons why you haven't tried out Pro, I would love to hear them. I may not be able to answer every one well enough to get you to check it out, but I would like the chance to try.
My contribution may not be
Mon, 01/14/2008 - 3:57am
My contribution may not be too helpful, but it will bump the thread. I sat on 1.2.3 for a long time as I could get the Sirrix / B410P working on it.
I'm just getting my head round 2.2.8 and grabbed Pro while I was there. I haven't had the time to form an opinion.
There are lots of people here with strong opinions. They seem quiet on this question.
I found the interface
Mon, 01/14/2008 - 12:00pm
I found the interface painfully (almost unusably) slow. I also had a huge amount of trouble getting registered, and getting my tdm400 to register. It also seems that the community support is much sparser, which is to be expected I guess.
All this lead me to abandon my attempts to work with Pro. I may take another run at it tho'
When did you look at the
Mon, 01/14/2008 - 12:08pm
When did you look at the interface? Over the past month we have added considerable amounts of hosting power to increase performance of the interface. I can whip through it these days. We have also made improvements in hardware detection and have menus from the console as well as the control panel to add new hardware. I would certainly appreciate you taking another look and providing feedback based on the current offering. Thanks.
PRO and A2Billing
Sun, 01/27/2008 - 6:55pm
Mr. Garrison
I am willing to upgrade to PRO SE, but I have not yet see anything about billing. I want to use PRO and also be able to "charge" my company's areas the amount of their call charges.
And even use the pre-paid function as well for some of my external sales people (who sometimes think money grows on trees).
My question is: Is there a way I can implement rates to the routes called?
I would also like to use DISA, since many of my employees are external sales people.
(that's when pre-paid is very useful to me.- without of course the use of PIN's)
I just saw an answer that you wrote to another alex (alexpalmer) and you told him to use an external software to do the job. Besides YATE which is very confusing to use, is there an GPL (open Source) software that can be used with TB PRO?
Thanks for your time.
Alex
You may be able to integrate
Sun, 01/27/2008 - 6:08pm
I think DTH Software's
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 8:17am
Interesting Question
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 8:42am
I have not tried it for the simple reason that I am a tinkerer. When things are not working quite right, I dive in and fix them. Be it Echo Cancellation, or custom dial plan needs, whatever.
I could be wrong, but I got the impression that PRO is very much a "hands off" system.
Greg Keys
Greg,
You are exactly the
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 8:54am
Greg,
You are exactly the type of person I would like to see try out Pro. I look at it as CE being an "application platform", if you need to do customizations, add extra scripts, development a particular application, then CE is the best choice. If you want a "Phone system" then Pro is a good choice. What I am looking for is people like yourself who can come back and say "I couldn't use it because _____". If you simply prefer CE over Pro that's entirely different, but what I am looking for are solid reasons for not being able to use it for what you want so I can see if there are any inherent design or functionality problems.
pcott,
What kinds of
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 11:08am
pcott,
What kinds of problems are you having? Pro runs as a DNS so that the phones do not lose registration if the internet connection goes down. If you have your own DNS server and populate the hosts information like Pro does then you don't have any need to use Pro for your DNS. It is simply a convience issue, it is not a forced requirement IF you have the means to get around it.
OK, I will bite :)
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 1:15pm
Answer a couple of qusstions for me before I fire this up.
Does PRO have a DHCP server active on install? I just need to be aware of it before I fire it up on my network.
I have Grandstreams, Snoms, and Cisco 7960s on my system. Are they all supported?
Does PRO have any Fax capibilities? Recieve fax and forward to email, fax detect on voice lines, etc.
Greg Keys
Pro will ask you if you want
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 4:32pm
Pro will ask you if you want to enable DHCP if you have two nics, by default it does not have DHCP running.
those phones are not all "supported" but you can manually add them easily, you just dont get any break on support if you use unsupported hardware.
Pro has no fax ability yet. We are working on some seriously cool stuff for it.
SLA is not supported, nor is it supported on CE/FreePBX.
My issues with Pro
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 5:32pm
I am the VoIP sysadmin for a Los Angeles ISP. We used to strictly offer hosted pbx services, but for the last year or so, we've moved most of our old customers and all of our new customers to trixboxes. When Pro came out, I was pretty excited and we became resellers. My main complaint with Pro is the inflexability and lack of choices with setup. I set up the vast majority of my CE installs to be dhcp servers for automatic configuration, so I wanted to do the same for Pro but have run into nothing but headaches. Firstly, I don't like to use trixbox as a gateway (most of my clients use untangle as their gateway), so I have no reason to have two NICs in the box, but I cannot setup DHCP without having two NICs. If I do have two NICs, then I cannot choose the network that the DHCP server uses, which is incredibly frusting (I don't see why the dhcpd.conf file gets rewritten by fonality, but it does). If I do not setup DHCP during the initial install and want to set it up later, it cannot be done. Also, last fall Aastra had a manufacturing problem with the 9133i's so they shipped out 53i's instead. I realize that the 53i is unsupported on Pro, but the client had already purchased the phones so my hands were tied. I manually rewrote the phone configuration files so that they would work with the 53i's, only to find out later that all the files in the /tftpboot/ folder were rewritten as well. I had to pull Pro off of that machine and setup CE instead. I have not sold a Pro server since. I just cannot trust that I'll be able to overcome any issue that I have during install, and I know that I can meet just about any requirements when using CE. Just my $0.02
Its funny, I use ce, (and
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 7:14pm
Its funny, I use ce, (and dare I say it -PBX in a Flash-) and have had little trouble with it. Pro, on the other hand, gave us all sorts of trouble....phones refusing to register, difficulty setting up IAX providers or other long distance providers, getting it to recognize my TDM400, the above mentioned DNS problems, and a host of other issues that I can't recall.
Its too bad, as I can think of a couple clients that would love it....BUT I dont trust pro, (and I really want to.)
I haven't had the same
Mon, 01/28/2008 - 7:55pm
I haven't had the same issues as you guys and want to address them properly. Aastra has a firmware problem in the 5 series that is causing a problem right now and we are waiting on new firmware to solve it. I will look into the DHCP issue.
pcott,
I havent experienced any of the problems you have, not sure what to say about that. Did you try it when it first came out or more recently?
Pro ...
Fri, 02/08/2008 - 8:59pm
We just converted to Trixbox Pro Call Center Edition. It's awesome. There are some things I would like to see added. Example. In the Que's we would like to be able to have multiple playlist, not just 2. I'm the system admin for a company that does hotel reservations, cruises, parking, transportation. Very busy call center enviroment. Money wasn't a huge issue and the cost of the Call Center Edition wasn't bad when compared to what we paid for our first traditional pbx. We were up and running the first day. We played it safe and ordered 2 dual core xeons with 4 gig of ram. We also recently got certified in Miami. We have customers that are looking at our Call Center and wanting these systems. My only draw back is the hybrid hosted. I love the fact that we can reinstall on another box enter our user name and password and everything starts downloading to the box. We've had customers interested in buying trixbox show concern's about the vpn connection. One being a Credit Union. Another worried about what happens to the trixbox pro platform is Fonality goes out of business. Not saying that would happen but it's a legitimate concern. I would love for there to be a option for each installation for the web interface to run on the customers own server or to be hybrid hosted, or even better yet have it in both places. One customer mentioned lifetime licenses are awesome but will the product still run if Fonality pulls the hybrid hosted version down or goes bye bye.
You guys are doing a awesome job. I highly recommend looking at Trixbox Pro. I love messing with things as well, things that are not crucial to the operation of a company. When it comes down to handing a product off to one of our customers we want it to be stable and Trixbox Pro is very stable.
Aastra phones during boot do a auto discovery, and find the trixbox everytime when on the lan. As long as the mac address and extension are built they are live and ready to go with all settings. Very cool. One down fall is that when we send a phone out to one of our remote workers they enter the configuration server setting and it doesn't add the x to the server name. We have to do a remote ticket, find the phone and then add s1111111x.trixbox.fonality.com and the phone immediately comes up. I would like to see this fixed.
Recording's also stop when your second line rings. Needs help there.
Report are excellent and easy to navigate. Sorry this is long! Go download it and see for yourself. You won't be wasting your time.
Phone home
Sun, 02/10/2008 - 7:51am
For us it's the phone home thing. What happens when - not if Fonality is sold, closes their doors whatever. We have clients using old Executone phone systems and DOS based DataFlex databases. These clients are likely to using these technologies 10 years from now.
My impression is that the phone home thing would prohibit our customers from using their phone system if Fonality changed owners, strategy whatever. Fonality may be different, however we frequently see situations where vendor strategy doesn't align with customer strategy. For example many older windows applications are having problems with Vista due to its lack of support for Visual Studio 2003 or earlier.
While we can't imagine that
Sun, 02/10/2008 - 8:16am
While we can't imagine that scenerio, we do appreciate the concern that people have over that. Any corporate buyout would be suicide that would shutdown thousands of customers that are paying for a service. We certainly would not entertain any plan that included that. This is not stopping people from using gmail, salesforce.com, web hosting, email hosting, or other hosted services today. With Dell on board selling this solution, they even feel that this is the right concept for small businesses because of how it allows us to manage, maintain, support, and upgrade large numbers of systems.
That said, if you still aren't comfortable, we offer additional protection. For $99 you can purchase a software escrow that would entitle you to all of the control panel and back end code should Fonality ever decide to shut down the services.
awesome
Sun, 02/10/2008 - 4:47pm
Kerry,
Is that available now? If so can we have data live in both places? There is the comfort level of the hybrid hosted since data is there minus voice mails. Also can you still access the server if we need support? What are people using for billing with PRO? See lots of things out there for CE.
You can buy the software
Sun, 02/10/2008 - 10:31pm
You can buy the software echo now, I'm not sure how but I will find out. The escrow process is that a third party escrow company maintains a copy of the source code and in the case of Fonality shutting down the service you would be given a copy of the source code. So no, you do not get the code unless we default on the escrow agreements.
I don't know anyone doing billing with Pro. I am going to be looking at DTH Software to see how what it takes to integrate into CE.
I'm trying out Pro SE, and I
Mon, 02/11/2008 - 2:43am
I'm trying out Pro SE, and I miss some obvious feaures found in CE:
- Call waiting
- Tell time
- Follow me
- no dial out prefix
- call forwarding via phone
All different key codes for functions, maybe they are going to change accordingly in CE? Seems logical enough with *86 for VM etc.
The hybrid hosting is good for offsite backups and managebility without having to set up FW exeptions to access my internal server. Stability seems good and for a basic phone system the feature set for SE is adequate except for the ones mentioned before...
EDIT:
Found an annoying problem...
I have since it's more common here, changed my dial prefix from 9 to 0. When I get into any extensions user portal to enable call forwarding to an external number it automatically prepends 9 when saving. This is not acceptable. shouldn't this change to reflect the current dial out prefix in the dial plan?
- Call waiting - It doesnt
Mon, 02/11/2008 - 8:15am
- Call waiting - It doesnt work or you can't toggle it? Please claridy
- Tell time - Doesn't your phone have a time display on it? You want the time script?
- Follow me - True, there is an amazing follow me system coming but I dont think it will be in SE
- no dial out prefix - truely annoying to me too
- call forwarding via phone - should be able to
Dial plan prepent bug - I have recently opened a bug on this myself.
Hi Kerry!
Call waiting - I
Tue, 02/12/2008 - 4:37am
Hi Kerry!
Call waiting - I can't find the functionality on PRO SE and the key codes does not tell me how to enable it. so maybe it's there but I can't find it?
Tell time - CE comes with a wonderful feature *60 that tells time. can't find that in PRO SE
CE comes with wake up call too :)
Call forwarding - can't find out how to activate forwarding using a phone and not through the web portal...
Call Waiting is enabled on
Tue, 02/12/2008 - 7:15am
Call Waiting is enabled on extensions by default
Tell Time - I dont see why this is an interesting feature since almost all phones display the time on them
Wake up call, this was removed from CE in version 2.4 and later
Forwarding, will look into that today, I never use that.
Hi Kerry!
Didn't know call
Wed, 02/13/2008 - 12:34am
Hi Kerry!
Didn't know call waiting was always on. doesn't say anywhere I have looked anyway :).
Tell time - well might be unnessecary then...
Call forwarding - I wait for an answer on that... But when speaking of forwarding, the feature to forward calls using the user portal is fine, BUT why on earth does the server prepend all my forwarded numbers with 91?? I have changed the dial out prefix to 0 because where I live that is more common than 9. (Europe). But I can't forward correctly ANYWHERE since the server still adds 91! shouldn't the server try to prepend whatever digit I have chosen as prefix??
When forwarding, should I enter the number as a local number or add country code and area code? 08xxxxxxx OR 468xxxxxxx?
Also the 911 dial plan can't be removed. Here in Europe we dial 112 for emergencies adding a dial plan like 1+12 works of course...
Trixbox 1.2.3 still rocks!!
Wed, 02/13/2008 - 1:10am
Hi All,
Sad to say i still use version 1.2.3 , the VM version from Nerdvittles..and it is rock solid..
I live in europe and my parents are in the caribbean, friend in other part of the world and we are all connected via this one box..Works like a charm..and it's free..just the way opensource was intended to be...Trixbox pro is limited in features and the amount of trunks (pressure from the community probably made it now possible to have unlimited trunks, the same for virtual extentions that required a licence) compared to the FREE versions...Wake up call, Tell time...Forwarding were all removed from CE.....shame.....get your self the free older version..a old PC ....and your better off...
Yes Pro might have its advantages...I'm glad we still have a choice....unless CE is choked to the point that Pro is the only option in the future...i'll keeps my eye's open and see how this plays out....
I also have an old 1.2.3 ISO
Wed, 02/13/2008 - 4:55am
I also have an old 1.2.3 ISO laying around just in case... :D But apart from missing a few extras and the annoying prefix dialling, I like to ease up on the hobby tinkering at home and just have a stable working phone system now... that said I of course will continue to experiment with CE, but not in my "production" environment... too much complaints from my family :)
Pro is intended to be a rock
Wed, 02/13/2008 - 5:59am
Pro is intended to be a rock solid business oriented phone system. It is not meant to have the consumer features that some people here want, that is not the goal of that project. With CE, we get more complaints about feature bloat than we do about taking different scripts and programs out of the distro. That isn't meant to choke CE, it is meant to reduce feature bloat. Especially simple scripts from places like nerd vittles that take only a few seconds to install, there is no reason for everything we can find to be stuffed into the default install.
driver28,
The 9 prepending bug has been reported to engineering and a fix should be in the next release.
truefocus,
The initial complaints about Pro were addressed as I have pointed out in this thread and in the trixbox Pro FAQ, so could you please let me know what else you consider to be a showstopper about Pro based on your impression of limited functionality? I am not trying to call you out here, my job is to find out reasons why people don't try Pro and try to address those issues.
My Showstopper
Thu, 02/21/2008 - 6:50pm
Since i am a newbie to pbx & voip I will end up using paid support through trixbox. Which is nice but before I make the leap. I would like to see routing by DIDs and being able to upload recorded files as well as having the system call you to record for quick changes. But having the ability is key for all companies if they what to sound professional for the main outgoing or on hold greeting. Hear is the logic for the routing by DID. Most entrepreneurs, small business tend to have more than one project going on. But most run on shoe string budget. I have surveyed several small business and found that they would benifit and would put money into a system but they would want this sort of functionality without having multiple systems and or using vmware.
Just some thoughts
Thanks
Joe
Unless I am looking at
Fri, 02/22/2008 - 12:35am
Unless I am looking at pricing wrong (and considering discount) the system appears higher priced than pbxtra in the same configuration.
We are bidding a 10 phone job with 4 pots lines. Polycom 501's, sangoma card with ec.
Razor thin margins. Too thin. (both with pro and pbxtra)
After sales commissions...that razor thin margin drops drastically low. If not completely disappears.
And with fonality selling against the very companies that they want to be resellers, that leaves no room for the dealer to get price margins up, since the client (who always asks what system) can get on the internet and see what the ceiling cap is if they bypass the dealer. And fonality brags that their systems are as easy as 1-2-3 to install. Just plug and play. : )
They always say sell the sizzle not the steak, but there is no sizzle when the big boy is competing with the dealers. Nothing against fonality. You guys are in need of revenues too. And you are in a rough spot when YOUR sales need to increase...but you don't have a dealer base that can supply that momentum yet. So the dilemma is YOU must sale...against the very dealer base you need to build. Catch 22.
While companies like mine MUST maintain higher margins to keep momma in shoes. : )
Joe,
I disagree, I have been
Fri, 02/22/2008 - 9:04am
Joe,
I disagree, I have been involved in well over 100 installations and ONE had routed DID's to different IVRs. If someone is ready to move up to needing more business class features, thats where Enterprise Edition comes in and provides the additional functionality needed in that environment. We obviously can't put every feature into the free product. At the beginning of April you will see trixbox Pro 2.0 come out and it does have quite a few new features in the free SE version but the free version does not get you everything.
Mark,
Our hardware prices are much higher, our phone prices are much higher, and we do NO consulting or installation. That is the main benefit of a reseller, if someone wants a very simple system than PBXtra may be a good fit. Most people do not go comparing PBXtra to a quoted trixbox Pro system as they have no clue about the two. trixbox Pro is geared towards resellers who are providing value added services like consulting, IVR configuration, installation, maintenance, etc. There is no way that PBXtra competes against that.
the question might be : Why to use Trixbox Pro?
Tue, 03/04/2008 - 10:58pm
i was testing Trixbox Pro CCE and works fine , very stable IP PBX but the support subscription were lack answers as: You dont, you cant, not supported, in the next release,etc; the answers of Trixbox.org are better than paid Trixbox Pro support subscription(i posted in Trixbox.org and in support.trixbox.com and i got the answer only of Trixbox.org(free) about Cisco 7960 ip phones).
Its a piny because the trixbox Pro its a great IP PBX!!(we tested with Cisco 7960/40G and Snom phones), and our customers had many expectation about this PBX (target customers 25-250 seats). IMHO Fonality must to improve the support subscription and add more ip phones platinum support (as Aastra 57i, yes i know the firmware trouble) and migrate to Asterisk 1.4 and still working in chat-presence-LDAP-video integration because the Trixbox PRO its a great product, super recommended for bussines customers.
I tested the Trixbox CE its for play at home (its a beauty Frankestein).
Why i said Fonality must to improve the support?, because we have support contracts of Fortinet, Cisco, and we had Digium-3com NBX, the knowledge base its very important and the technical exchange information its vital for the Resellers(you cant get a answer of not in TxPro when you know that you can do with Asterisknow, thats terrible, e.g. call time limit).
I still believe that TrixPRO will be the leading IP telephony, but you must give more emphasis to development and compared with Cisco Unified Comm or Avaya.
My 2 cents
Renttec
Enterprise Edition features
Fri, 03/07/2008 - 10:07am
Hello Kerry,
Enterprise Edition has the ability to have multiple ivr's with routed DID's to thoose ivr's for mutli company use correct. If this is the case, does all the extensions have access to every extension or can the extension be limited to their particular group. Like company A extension can only ring company A. Company B can only ring company B.
Thanks
Joe
The advantages are that we
Thu, 04/24/2008 - 3:41pm
The advantages are that we can push out updates and fixes without you having to do anything. For example, with existing trixbox Pro 1.0 systems they were just all upgraded for free to trixbox Pro 2.0 without having to do anything.
Secondly, should your system have a major failure, you can spin up a new machine and it will automatically resync all your settings.
Third, because of the nature of the architecture, we monitor every machine and can send notifications to you when there are issues.
There is more than that but those are some of my favorite basic features.
Member Since:
2006-05-31