Some of the recent press has been filled with events that have not been particularly pleasant to read and I’m happy to bring more positive news. I’ve talked about the cross pollination of complimentary and related projects in a past post and with today’s news I am excited to reinforce to the community that this is the norm amongst most of the projects in the Open Telephony space.

We embarked on the Open Telephony Training Seminar late last year, prompted by community members looking to us to fill a void of training material that has not been available elsewhere. The reception has been overwhelming not only by our installed base but by many of the prominent telephony vendors as has been seen by their involvement and generous contribution to this program.

Today I bring you more evidence of the synergy by announcing our next seminar to take place at the one an only, Asterisk Ground Zero, at Digium’s Headquarters in Huntsville, AL. “One of Digium’s primary goals is to expand the use of the Asterisk telephony engine and to be a good corporate citizen within the Asterisk ecosystem. To further this aim, we have contributed to the FreePBX project in various ways, including taking an active role in supporting their OTTS training program. We are happy to strengthen the relationship with the FreePBX project, and are proud to host their next seminar in our state-of-the-art training facility.” says Jared Smith, World Wide Training Manager for Digium, Inc. and co-author of the one and only Asterisk: The Future of Telephony (O'Reilly Media). We are thrilled to have this opportunity and have appreciated the support Digium has provided and the training material and presentations that Jared Smith has delivered in our sessions.

Whether you are looking for training or not, we hope that this news brings a bit of encouragement that different projects, which may include areas of overlap (that some consider ‘competition’) can work together synergistically to continue fueling the disruptive technologies that we have all been working so hard to evolve and use against those who we consider the real competitors, the traditional giants of the telecom world.

For more information on the training, you can go to the Open Telephony Training Seminar section of the website. The quick and dirty summary is:

Where: Digium Headquarters, Huntsville, AL
When: August 12-15^th, 2008

Now for the project plug. If you like what you see, the close collaboration of such projects vs. the unfortunate events of the recent past, vote here by pressing the following button:

For now, signing off but will be back soon with other news to come.

Philippe – On Behalf of the FreePBX and OTTS Teams

It’s been quiet on the blog for a few weeks as I’ve been in catch-up mode having been on vacation for a while, away from all forms of internet and telephony technology, and afterwards, I just got back from a week of another successful Open Telephony Training Seminar.

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:

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!