FreePBX Moves on and Up !!!

In the past we mentioned that Fonality caused a few waves in the Opensource Community by developing their own version of FreePBX to work more closely with their Trixbox product, it seems that FreePBX has now entered the hands of bandwidth.com by hiring the project’s main developer as its Open Source Community Developer and is said to be committing significant resources and effort to expand the scope of the project.

An informal announcement of bandwidth.com’s commitment to FreePBX came through the main developer Philippe Lindheimer’s blog at www.freepbx.org on 14th November in a post called “A Bright Future for FreePBX.” Lindheimer said he had “joined forces” with bandwidth.com as its Open Source Community Director and indicated both he and bandwidth.com would work to expand the scope of FreePBX and to assure it remains “open and strong.”

Lindheimer cited bandwidth.com’s efforts in purchasing the FreePBX trademark and its efforts with FreeSwitch as areas where the company has been helpful to the open source community. Since bandwidth.com sells VoIP and data services not software then there appears to be no conflict of interest.

This is the latest coup for FreePBX; the web based GUI provides preprogrammed functionality and ease of use on top of Asterisk, including features such as follow me, ring groups with calls confirmation, music on hold, conferencing, and paging and intercom functionality for many SIP phones. Digium incorporated FreePBX into its compilation of the AsteriskNow 1.5 turnkey release in October.

See the blog entry here.

Snom Collaborate with Fonality

With Asterisk based products one of the big objections to deploying them is compatibility with software and hardware, there is such a wide range of products in the market place that often it is the customer who suffers the pain while ‘glitches’ are sorted out.

Fonality has added a new partner to its “ecosystem” this week, as Snom Technologies announced it would be a third-party partner for deployments of Fonality IP PBX systems. Snom makes VoIP phones, such as the 3xx series and M3 IP Dect, for the SME market, which Fonality is strong in.

Fonality’s FACE program (Fonality Authorized Certified Ecosystem) allows resellers and third party vendors to assure customer confidence and decrease issues like non compliance. These companies also offer increased integration with Fonality’s products, including trixbox CE, trixbox Pro and PBXtra.

So it is good to see a couple of big players in this marketplace working together.

Have a look at the Snom Press Release here.

Trixbox moves away from FreePBX

We like to try and keep an eye on what happens in the Asterisk community and we have always liked the Trixbox CE product, well it seems there is a real spat going on with Trixbox.

Trixbox began life as Asterisk@Home, and was later rebranded as Trixbox. Asterisk in it’s early life did not have a configuration GUI and configuration was always time consuming so this lead to the design of configuration tools, one such tool was called AMP (Asterisk Management Portal), and that became known as FreePBX. Trixbox was distributed with FreePBX as the GUI tool.

Well it seems Trixbox is now distancing themselves from FreePBX, and has moved to create their own forked configuration tool, which is more tightly integrated with Trixbox. Trixbox also mentioned security concerns, faster bug fixes and improved features as additional reasons for this change. Trixbox has released CE v2.6.2, which includes the GPL patch for their integrated version of FreePBX, and this is currently a BETA release.

The formal announcement on the Trixbox Forum here has lead to some very lively debate.

It is our guess Trixbox users will be happy but that fans of FreePBX will not – it seems the Asterisk community would prefer to see FreePBX survive in its own right espescially as it helped Fonality get a foothold in the PBX market along the way. You will see from the comments on the forum that feelings certainly run high when this sort of things happens

Dell Chooses Fonality Open Source

We see that Dell has decided to offer the Fonality software as a bundled option on their servers – this is a real catch for Fonality as there are many other Asterisk based solutions that Dell could have chosen.

This is a bold move by Dell but I guess we should not be surprised as it is just another application that will help them sell servers but for Fonality it will mean they have many more customers that they will be able to cross-sell their other products to. It certainly brings Asterisk solutions more mainstream.

See the report over on TMC NET here

Visit Fonality here and Dell here