You may have found a rash of spam in your inbox this morning, or run into it on the forums if you spent any time earlier today having a look. We had a spammer send dozens of replies to dozens of threads last night with your typical "rolex watch" or equivalent spam that floats around on the web.

There have been some inquiries over the last few weeks along with some additional news that has come out concerning the direction of FreePBX v3 and the lack of activity in SVN.

Rest assured that the intensive work that has gone into this project is live and well but will be continuing under a new project name.

We are excited to have the 2.8 release finalized and released for general availability. We moved to final release status at the beginning of this past week finishing the 2.8 Milestone with 332 closed tickets comprising of 231 bugs and 101 feature requests and similar. As always, a majority of the bug fixes are bugs from version 2.7 and earlier which are usually only addressed in the new release.

I'm hoping that all of you in the States had a good July 4th Weekend, or for our Northern neighbors, a great Canada Days celebration! The current 2.8 release is looking great with over 2700 systems running the new version and very little noise on the bug tracker front. With those stats, we will be moving it from a release candidate to a final release this week so stay tuned!

If you have not already noticed, we pushed the FreePBX 2.8 Upgrade Module out to the online repository. This means that you can download and upgrade your 2.7 systems to the current beta as you would any other module! This was done earlier this week and we've already seen a significant number of new systems upgrade to 2.8 as a result of this.

In our never ending quest to make FreePBX the best phone system that doesn't require money to buy (and even better than most that do cost money...), allow us to introduce you to the latest features in the Backup & Restore module. Last week we alluded to a critical server error, but left you guessing as to how we address that. This is a big step in that direction.

Version 2.8 has really shaped up with quite a few new features from when we first launched the 2.8 Milestone. I'm really excited to see many of the changes and nuggets of features that we have squeezed into this release since kicking it off just 3 months ago! We are almost at the home stretch so roll up your sleeves and help us get there!

Do you use the Dial-by-Name option of the current FreePBX Directory? If no, read on as you might find there is goodness to come. If yes, have you ever wanted to add a user with no voicemail? have your admin called instead of you? wanted to add a Ring Group or Queue to it, call an external cell phone, or more?

The current Dial-by-Name directory achieves some basic goals but has always left a lot to be desired. In a lot of use cases it was plagued with issues that made it less than desirable and in my opinion often not viable.

"The v3 ISO is almost here..." and then the schedule slips again. If you've been around software long enough you know that release dates always slip. Luckily, unlike some of the big software giants out there, we try not to slip our schedules by years :-) We also have an excuse, it's Open Source, which makes it a bit harder to control the resources when almost all of them are community members donating their time to the project while often trying to run their own businesses as well!