Aastra Frustration

[Stewart]

The new firmware 3.2.2.56 adds a whole bunch of really nice features, especially for the 39i.
The 3 that I like the most are:
1. The ability to add a background photo for the 39i. While it makes the picture extremely bright and you need to darken it a lot to make it display right on the phone, in the end it looks incredible.
2. The ability to have the phone never play a sent DTMF tone. Perfect! Frankly I should never hear the DTMF tone played once the phone has received it so this is really nice.
3. The ability to overwrite the buttons on the front page of in-call so I can do some creative transferring. Really nice.

Why it just doesn't work:
1. The Aastra scripts don't work. Well, portions do. Kinda.
2. The documentation is wrong. It says the same commands such as Key:Xfer and Key:Keypad1 still work, they don't. It's caused all of my scripts to break on the 57i and the 39i.
3. The in-call status screen doesn't show in certain scenarios on the 39i. I've narrowed it to if you place a call to another extension, it'll show you if they are available. It's a nice touch, but if you don't clear it before the other end picks up the in-call status screen doesn't appear. The only way I can make it come up is if I place the call on hold and then pick it back up. To be fair, this happens with every firmware version I've tried so far. Maybe it's a bug in the scripts, but I don't know which one to check.
4. I lose the "Park" button on my in-call menu. It's there in all the other firmware versions.

I've looked through and have done some investigating and the firmware causes the same problems with my scripts and the ones produced by Aastra (from what I can tell). Key emulation is broken in this latest release of firmware. Once it gets outputted to the phone it just constantly reposts the php and it makes the phone appear locked up (on the 57i) or causes strange behavior (on the 39i) such as playing busy tones at the end of voicemail messages.

And if I simulate an Xfer on the 39i, some numbers, and Xfer it should transfer the call to whatever the numbers are. That works the first time. Each additional time it continues to remember the last time(s) you sent the command. The first time it's "111" and it transfers fine. If I do it a second time it's "111111" and the transfer fails. If I do it a third time it's "111111111" and the transfer fails. And so on. This is consistent across all firmwares I've tried with it. It works fine on the 57i 2.6.x firmware (not the 3.2.2.x). The documentation for how it's accomplished hasn't changed with the firmware.

But my biggest frustration is that there is nobody at Aastra who really helps. I know Aastra1 does from time to time, but responses are sporadic. I'm not looking for them to solve my problems, but I would like to help them squash their bugs. If they are successful, I am successful. Whenever I call about various things I'm always told that there isn't anyone that can help with scripting. I've got scripts that would be beneficial to add to the list and ideas for others, but there isn't anyone I can work with to help bring them to life. I don't even know where I can report these problems.

If anyone else has any experience or willingness to program scripts for the Aastra phones I'd like to know. I created a dialplus script a while back and even though I had over a hundred downloads, I got no feedback.

/rant

 

[briankelly63]

I had sent the following to Aastra1 back in Feb of 2011 his reply is at the bottom. It doesn't seem as if the situation has improved, in fact it seems worse. Perhaps it is time for us to start calling Aastra...

Dear Aastra1,

Is there someone at Aastra I could contact who might be persuaded to: carve out more of your time for the support of the scripts, hire additional resources or create a process for reaching you or one of your counterparts more formerly?

I buy Aastra equipment because of these scripts and would no longer do so if the scripts started to lapse in some way.

You've been a great resource but you've been "missing" for quite awhile. I would rather see more formal support for these scripts even if that required a subscription of some sort or a support agreement. Issues can't always wait till your able to check in on the forum.

I've never really seen an arrangement like this where a company clearly invests a great deal of time an energy creating something like these scripts, they know a lot of people on multiple platforms depend on them and then only seem to have one employee intermittently support them. An employee, I might add, who clearly seems to have a lot of other priorities and projects. Its a rather unfair position you've been put in.

So again, nothing against you but if you could PM me with an Aastra contact I'd appreciate it otherwise I'll be bounced all over the place if I just try guessing who to call.

Brian

-----------------------

Hi Brian,

I really understand your concerns. These XML scripts started more as a proof of concept to promote our XML API and we made them open source because we wanted the community to actually develop them.

After a while we realized that it will probably never happen and now we must keep updating them just to keep up with Asterisk, freePBX and our own firmware...

I will be discussing internally to find a way to provide a better service than me looking at the forum once a week...

Will let you know. Anyway as you can see, we are still there as we prepare the next version of the scripts to properly support 3.2.x firmware and a couple of cool enhancements.

Regards

aastra1

 

[Stewart]

Unfortunately, yes.

 

[Stewart]

I entirely agree with your sentiment. I purchase the Aastra phones because of the scripts and the flexibility I get to create with them as clients need. Otherwise, the audio quality is superior on the Polycom phones. I could just use them and have less work to do. I really don't understand the management decisions to only go at it 90% instead of 100%.

I think the biggest problem is that there isn't a proper support channel that gives us the freedom to create scripts. Unfortunately, from what I have seen there isn't a much support from the community by way of development. At least I haven't found anyone that can help. I've tried to be a developer of sorts but cant get any support to develop with. They change the way a phone responds in the firmware without documentation. How am I supposed to work with that? I've submitted blocks of code describing what's wrong and asking for assistance in solving the problem. I only post when I've created it as close to the description in the documentation as possible. If they want us as the community to develop, they need to support their developers. I'm just not sure if there are any other developers.

 

[tm1000]

Why don't we just put these up on github? Then eveyone can collaborate add subtract etc

Seriously folks. Github is the WAY to collaborate on projects. (https://github.com/tm1000)

From what I've heard through the grapevine is that Aastra doesn't really care about Asterisk anymore. They are focusing instead on Microsoft Lync, as is everyone else.

 

[Stewart]

It's sad because some of us have staked a rather large share of our business on them. I have an install of 100+ phones coming up in a few weeks and have sold tons of their products. Most of our growth during the recession has been this project and most of those sales have been Aastra phones in the system. By the end of this year I'll have sold close to $50K (our cost) of Aastra phones (not including other vendors, service, servers, etc.) over the last 24 months in a HaaS model. Maybe I'm not big potatoes to them, but that's a lot of capital investment for us to make to float cash like that on a companies reputation. Now I just feel like I'm being tossed aside.

I think if they gave us 3 things we'd be miles ahead of where we are now. People would stop complaining and their reputation would improve greatly among us that have invested .
1. A SOLID version of the 3.2.2.56 FW
2. A month of really active support on the script help to overcome the hurdles we have
3. A real method of communicating problems.

My latest contract is a 5-year deal with a major company. I need these phones to be stable. I mean, just look at these forums. Half the questions are either about Aastra phones they have or if they should buy them.

 

[Stewart]

Is there enough community support to go through the effort to post on GitHub? The real problem is the Firmware am I'm afraid only Aastra has the code for that.

 

[Stewart]

I can only hope someone at Aastra sees this and responds.

 

[mag]

Being a long time user and supporter of Aastra, I too have become frustrated with the lack of movement on these issues (firmware, XML scripts, innovation, etc).

They have been completely focused on Microsoft Lync to the detriment of of all others. Anyone remember Response Point and where that went?

I would recommend you contact your distributor and the Aastra sales manager for your area.

I have brought this thread to the attention of Aastra and hopefully they will start taking notice, but if they are like most large corporations, they just do not "get" open source and the community around it, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

[Stewart]

If they want to stop the scripts, fine. We'll pick them up and run with them. But the firmware? That's not something to "get". That's making their products work. Period. How did you bring this to the attention of Aastra?

 

[tm1000]

Mag hit it on the head. They see TONS of $$$ in Lync (as I said earlier) so therefore that is now their primary focus, to which they will put everything else on the back burner

 

[mag]

I agree completely about the firmware, I was just making a comment on the general lack of understanding of the open source world by corporations.

Unfortunately $$$ (and big names) talk and they do not see the immediate return in supporting us adequately. But if enough resellers/integrators/customers raised their voices and let Aastra know their thoughts, we will have more chance of affecting change.

I have a good relationship with the Aastra Regional Sales manager and brought this thread to his attention. He has heard these rumblings from others before and has passed this thread on to his managers.

If all resellers, etc did this, I believe it may help in getting heard.

I'm all for putting the scripts on Github or somewhere else - there are others who have worked on them as well and maybe everything can be consolidated in one site?

 

[Stewart]

Suppose there is a way to get the firmware uncompiled for us to fix? Not sure if we'd know our way around them, but I'd give it a shot.

 

[TheMole]

wow, this really is a bummer. i've got several aastra phones installed in one location - luckily, i never upgraded from the original (or close to original) scripts so things work fairly well for my needs.

i purchased the aastra phones because of the scripts.

if asterisk is being abandoned by aastra, i'll likely move on to polycom phones - the sound and build quality is better, imho, but the feature set is lacking and confusing to set up.

[the piaf community needs an open source phone]

 

[Stewart]

If you're using the 57i's, then staying with the latest 2.6.x firmware is good and the 2.3.0 scripts offer quite a bit of improvement over the previous, especially in the voicemail section. I haven't tried the 2.3.1. One of the problems I had with upgrading to the 2.3.0 was audio quality suffered greatly because of the customized codec line put into the mac.cfg files. A call to Aastra was useless. Once I got it squared away, though, they are worth the upgrade.

While I completely agree with you that an open source phone to develop for is nice, is there anyone else in the community that creates custom scripts for these phones? All the scripts I've found have been created by Aastra and I've found very little support from the community when trying to create my own. I had over a hundred downloads on the one I put up, but only 1 feedback to let me know of a problem and no opinions otherwise.

Maybe it was just dis-interest at what I was writing (that's fine) but the community support I've seen has been severely lacking for coding for these phones. I've posted several times with a coding question with no reply. I'd be very happy to be wrong on this, but I've learned that if I'm having coding problems for the Aastra phones I can't ask Aastra for help and I can't ask here for help because neither get me a reply. And the xml manuals don't ever talk about the php portion that coding is actually done in. A few php examples in the xml sections to show how to code for it would've saved me months of headache.

I've done some limited coding for the Polycom phones and it's a lot harder.

 

[thx2000]

I agree with just about everything in this thread. It really looks like they're dumping all of their resources into Lync and have lost interest in their SIP products all together. It's been about a year and a half since the last stable script release. The current 3.x firmwares are extremely buggy and aastra1 hasn't posted anything in the forum for more than 4 months.

Maybe I just missed this before, but they're also trying to distance themselves from the scripts on their website: http://www.aastra.com/xml-scripts-for-pbx-in-a-flash.htm

All these advanced features are now available from your Aastra SIP Phone. The scripts are not supported by Aastra's regular Support organization as they are open source. For any support issues regarding these scripts, please visit the endpoints section of the PBX in a Flash forum, some Aastra engineers are part of it.

I am glad the source code is available for these scripts, however I wish they would have made their intentions clear from the beginning.

Is there enough community support to go through the effort to post on GitHub? The real problem is the Firmware am I'm afraid only Aastra has the code for that.

For myself, I'd like to say yes, however I think I would only have time to contribute to bug fixes. I agree that the quirks with the phones still appear to be firmware issues and not xml script issues.

If the scripts do become a community project, I fear we'll be at a significant disadvantage as it seems that the scripts have fueled development on the firmware side and visa versa.

For example, the current voicemail script allows for playback options through the softkeys (ffw, rew, stop, etc...). I attempted modifying the voicemail app a few years back to add the same features and the firmware at the time prevented dtmf tones from being played while an xml application was open. I contacted Aastra to see if this was something they could fix/facilitate and I was brushed off. Perhaps a larger community would have better luck than a lone developer getting Aastra to respond to these sorts of firmware issues. However it's a bit of a catch 22, as it's going to be hard to drive interest in a project like this if Aastra is now complacent about their firmware problems.

 

[Stewart]

I just looked at that link. The scripts are open source and are all text so they're easy to work with, but those aren't the 2.3.0 scripts. Those are the older 2.2.1 scripts.

 

[thx2000]

I was referring to the verbiage, not the version of the scripts.

 

[Stewart]

I understand. Just wanted to make sure everything was clear for everyone who reads the thread. I hadn't noticed that verbage before. I wonder when it was changed.

 

[Speedy2k]

I don't really understand why is evryone is complaining about Aastra? First of all, have you ever seen another manufacturer tech on this forum ? Second, Have you already seen another manufacturer XML script on this forum? Third, If you stay with the 2.6.latest firmware and the latest xml scripts and FreePBX 2.8, they are pretty goods. Some modification make them work pretty well on FreePBX 2.9. and finally, from the begining, Aastra as always told that they areworking on those scripts to give exemple for the community. To be honest, i have found the 3.xx firmware to be really buggy, but the latest 2.6 is working just fine. Aastra is the only company that assupported the open sources community so far and you are all bashing on them. I sure hope they will restart developement on those scripts and firmware, but just today, they are pretty damn good.