Choosing an IP Phone for your business can be an overwhelming task when considering today’s extensive market offerings. It’s difficult to identify the clear ‘winner’ when most makes and models offer similar hardware specifications when compared to their class, such as large color displays, multiple programmable buttons, HD voice, speakerphone and more line extensions than you’ll ever need.

So, playing the numbers game down a data sheet is clearly not the correct way to make a selection, but then how do you make the right choice?

The compelling differences between IP phone vendors becomes evident when focusing on the level of integration they have with the phone system (or PBX) they are paired with. Typically, IP phones designed by the same manufacturer as the phone system provide the highest level of integration because all the time and money is spent perfecting the combination. This allows the IP phone to leverage the full software capabilities of that phone system, enabling phone users with an advanced level of features. Check back soon for a future blog post where we will be discussing phone system features.

For businesses using FreePBX or PBXact phone systems, the IP phones that have the tightest level of integration are Sangoma s-Series IP phones, since they are all designed to work together and made by the same manufacturer – Sangoma Technologies. The s-Series IP phones offer users many advanced features and in fact go even a step further to offer some very unique features not seen on the market today.

Some of Sangoma’s s-Series IP phone unique features are:

BLF (Busy Lamp Field) Long & Short Press: The ability to long press or short press BLF extensions to have customized actions. For example, you can program a BLF extension so that it can intercom the extension if idle state, or go straight to voicemail on busy state, by simply short pressing the BLF extension. BLF Long & Short Press Features Guide

5-way Conference Calling with Leader Drop-off: Allows users to intuitively add up to 5 participants on a phone call. Great for taking care of business right away instead of having to schedule a conference call to invite your parties. The conference leader can even disconnect from the call without affecting others on the call. More on Conference Calling

Phone Apps: Advanced phone applications allowing users to control most popularly used features using the display and navigation buttons. Think of PhoneApps as having full-screen control to manage each of the tools most commonly used, such as DND, call-forwarding, conferencing, which completely eliminate the need to remember feature codes. This saves users and businesses time and money. List of Phone Apps & Demos

UC Intelligent Features: Most of the features users control from their IP phone are actually adjusted on the phone system! This keeps all the intelligence with the phone system (and not locally on the phone) so that it is able to do things such as: update all the user’s other devices when they update their presence settings to Do-Not-Disturb; send voicemail to the user’s extension if a call is forwarded to the user’s alternate number which goes unanswered…etc. Many of the other manufactures’ phone features are controlled locally on the phone, leaving the phone system unaware of those change, which spells unexpected phone events for users. What is UC?

UCP Integration: Ability to customize Sangoma IP phone programmable buttons and PhoneApp settings directly from the User Control Panel of FreePBX and PBXact, allowing users to customize the look and feel of their s-Series phones without the need for IT support. Check Out UCP for EndPoint Manager

So, which is the right IP phone for you? It all depends on what type of solution you are looking for. If you are looking for a basic phone any phone will do, but if you are looking for a solution to help users be more productive, save your business time and provide staff and customers the best experience possible, then it’s the IP phone that best utilizes its ecosystem.

For more information on Sangoma IP Phones for FreePBX or PBXact visit: https://www.sangoma.com/products/phones/

It’s sure been an amazing year here at Sangoma. We are finally proud to announce the official stable release of FreePBX 14 and also the stable release of our Enterprise Linux 7 based distro which contains many updated system libraries, not least of which is PHP 5.6.31, NodeJS 8.1.4, and Python 3.6.

Over the last 16 months, we’ve been hard at work developing FreePBX 14, and we’d like to highlight four (of the many) major improvements: Auto-Update Security Releases, Distro updates in Module Admin, Calendar Module, and an upgraded User Control Panel (UCP). To learn more about all of the new features of FreePBX 14 make sure to checkout our last blog on FreePBX: https://www.freepbx.org/freepbx-14-release-candidate/

Since then, we’ve also introduced a few major features in parallel into FreePBX 13 (that are also in FreePBX 14), the most significant one being multiple and improved directory support in User Manager. Now you can setup multiple Active Directories, LDAP directories and internal directories to control the Users that are on your PBX. FreePBX will even auto create extensions for you from your remote directories. Of course, as FreePBX is an Open Source project, this is all completely free!

You may be asking yourself “What does a new version of PHP or NodeJS get me?”. Previously in FreePBX 13 and lower we were working with PHP 5.3 and NodeJS 0.12. By requiring newer versions of these as part of FreePBX 14, apart from significant improvements in the languages themselves, the performance improvements are the most noticeable difference. This means you’ll have a snappier FreePBX on your hand, with much quicker reload times. Behind the scenes, on the back end, we are also able to utilize new libraries that also have performance improvements in themselves.

https://lornajane.net/posts/2014/php-5-6-benchmarks/

We’ve started work on FreePBX 15 which we hope to have an early release of in October 2017. Three of the most important features we are planning for FreePBX 15 is a complete revamp of our RestAPI, Backup and Restore upgrades, so you will – in the future – be able to restore from and to a different versions (Only 15 and higher, so will be able to restore – for example – 15 into 16 or 17 into 15), and a new File Store module, which will allow you to store backups (or faxes and other files) on S3, FTP, email, ssh and more!

Over the next year we will also be working on bringing FreePBX onto PHP 7.x with commercial modules.

With the release of this blog we have also released a version of the FreePBX module “Version Upgrader”, which is for standard manual, or custom installed systems, and will help the owner upgrade all the associated packages (PHP, and Node, as mentioned above). For FreePBX Distro installs we are fine tuning and checking a simple one-line command that you can run on your server to upgrade the Operating System to 7, and FreePBX to 14 at the same time, all automatically. Of course, when running this RPM your system will reboot and there will be downtime, and there are some minor prerequisites (such as a 64 bit machine, and at least 10gb of free space). As of today the distro upgrader is being released as a public beta, and more information is available on our wiki page: https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/PPS/Upgrading+from+FreePBX+10.13.66+to+SNG7

Please remember, as adoption of FreePBX grows there may be things we missed. If you find any issues please open a bug at https://issues.freepbx.org and we’ll look into it as soon as we can. You can also ask for help on our Community Forums, where you may be able to get assistance from experts in the community, too.

Thank you for using FreePBX and we look forward to what develops through 2017!