Q&A re: upcoming 4.0 upgrade

[Darren Schreiber]

I'm proposing a ticket where the existing call-forwarding section in SmartPBX is changed to show:

* Forward all calls
* Forward calls only if SIP device is unregistered (failover)
* Off

I don't know if it will be accepted but that is the existing design that's already built so if it's accepted it could go out fairly quickly assuming it gets approved. The rest of the team has to agree with me that it actually works that way, though, and that there's no risk in exposing it.

For now you can also set this via the API on the backend.

[Rick Guyton]

I think what might be a lot more helpful for us is a setting for forward calls if all devices in the call group are unregistered.

[Darren Schreiber]

OK, please file a ticket for that feature (or start a separate discussion here on that) for call groups. There is no functionality for that and it requires somehow pre-checking all parties in a ring group, and if they are ALL offline, then sending to an alternate callflow.

Currently, there's logic that says:
"Retrieve list of devices for user for a bridge string." and the failover function adds an if in there so it's "Retrieve list of devices for user for a bridge string, and if any device is unregistered and failover is checked, return a call forward string instead."


That's very different from a ring group, which would need to be modified to somehow check if all users are offline and, if so, then forward somewhere else. That functionality doesn't exist.

[Karl Stallknecht]

Agreed Rick. 

My other concern here is a lot of our customers with crappy Internet lose registration constantly, so this would cause incoming calls to keep going back and forth between their desk phone and cell phone constantly and it would get annoying for the customer.

[Darren Schreiber]

@Karl I don't understand. Wouldn't the correct solution be to correct the internet, or tell the customer that calls fail because of their crappy internet and NOT use the failover feature in such a scenario?

[Rick Guyton]

Darren: Ok, will do. Heck maybe I'll make it my first OS pull request. :) It's so cool to have time to do this stuff now.

Karl: Yea, for us, many of our clients have call groups that span multiple locations. So it's kind of silly to forward calls just because one location is down. Also, we have some very large call groups and I couldn't imagine calls all forwarding just because someone is moving their phone or something.

[Tuly]

What we are waiting the most, I think is call recording... from the 4.0 announcement post, it fid look like in the first couple of months it will not be exposed in the front end UI, so if you can please make it clear, when call recording will be easily available to configure, that would be very much appreciated, as we have a lot of clients waiting for it, LOTS LOTS and also when on demand call recording will be available, (DTMF)

[Darren Schreiber]

Thanks for this feedback.

This is on the back-end only and not available on the Hosted Platform yet because the front-end component is still in design.

I've noted the urgency to the team though.

[Karl Stallknecht]

@Darren: Let's say the customer's Internet is going in and out constantly one day. This feature you mentioned would cause some calls to still go to their desk phones which might be a bad idea because the call could cut out or have poor quality. So this means that the customer would have to manually enable call forwarding always (or the "* Forward all calls" option you listed above as the proposed setting) in order to make everything go to their cell phone.

The phone(s) could signal a loss of registration for many reasons, and sometimes we even see customers have loss of registration emails get triggered but no noticeable outage took place, so this would unnecessarily send a call here and there to the cell phone.

[Darren Schreiber]

@Karl can you describe to me how the call failover SHOULD work then, under the circumstances you stated your client experiences?

[Tuly]

@karl I don't see anything wrong with what Darren suggested, you can never be protected 100 % if theyr having issues with the internet the best solution could be that it should go to your cell phone, maybe a suggestion could be, only if the phone was not registered for the last 10 minutes or so only then it should be forwarded

[Karl Stallknecht]

I guess I don't really see a way that this could practically work, that's the thing...right now we just contact customers manually when we receive loss of registration email(s) for them. Sometimes they want us to forward and sometimes they don't want us to depending on the time of day, who is working, what else is going on, etc.

Basically what I am saying is that I personally don't think it is worth spending time/money building this feature if it would be impractical. I see a lot of people jumping on board with it at first, and then realizing it's not as simple as it sounds and there are too many caveats.

But this is just my opinion :-)

[Darren Schreiber]

Also, as a reminder, if you want to see what's coming out in the next month, check the Sandbox server.

[Tuly]

The Sandbox server is public? If not can I have a login?

[Darren Schreiber]

Yes, email in a support ticket if you don't have creds and we'll get you them. This request won't count against your support credits.

[Rick Guyton]

Q: What is the start and end time of the maintenance?

I didn't see the end time specified. When is it?

[Karl Stallknecht]

So it looks like the failover was added? But it's listed under the number manager? I'm confused on how exactly this works...

[Darren Schreiber]

Ugh grumble grumble that doesn't belong there.

I believe that feature is only for PBX Connector. I don't think that just works on any old number. I'll have to check, engineering may have added an enhancement I'm unaware.

So, no, don't use that one. The new one for device/user failover is not exposed yet.

[Darren Schreiber]

Is that seen on Sandbox or production?

[Karl Stallknecht]

Production

[Guest]

Good luck tonight, guys! If possible can you please wait to start anything that may take down service until after 10pm PST? I just completed a 550 store rollout and they have 1/3 on the west coast that close at 10pm. 8pm outage would be really bad...

[Darren Schreiber]

Estimated for 6am Pacific Time completion.

[Darren Schreiber]

Hi there!
      We're trying to avoid disruption best we can in general, but I can't shift the maintenance any further back I'm afraid. We will keep you in mind though and may do the west coast servers last.

[Darren Schreiber]

I'll see what we can do about this after the upgrade. That feature only works with PBX Connector as far as I know.

[Guest]

thanks Darren - I appreciate it