FOOD FOR THOUGHT Oh boy am I sooooo confused - no solution for me :-(

[mainenotarynet]

I have been using the PBX in a flash / FreePBX stuff for sooo long that I am having an awful time finding a replacement that won't make my head EXPLODE.

Back Story:
I have a Notary Business (16 counties in my state -- exts in 101XX-119XX range)
My other half has a craft business (same setup but exts in 201XX-219XX range)
We are BOTH ham radio operators (Me W1KMC -- her K1DAE) and am setting up exts in the 30XX-39XX range (this also has a dedicated extension, DID, and Trunk for my volunteering with the American Red Cross).

In total the way it stands now 98 extensions -most WILL be virtual but anyone who NEEDS to make calls out the system will be SIP

Yes I have LOTS of room to expand if I get lucky.

I have a Dedicated Box but for some reason loading Issabel4 AND Wazo barfed so I tried Woothosting (what a piece of that turned out to be - customer service lacking BIG TIME - especially on stuff I SHOULD be able to do on my own -- 3 Days to try stuff for refund REALLY?!) So I am now on Digital Ocean and DID get Wazo (HA) running on 2 droplets with Neorouter on a second VPS I already had.

Wazo has the (sort of) feel of FreePBX that I'm used to but gigantic pieces are not to be found anywhere (IVR, FollowMe, Call Flow Control, Sytem Recordings just to name a few) and from what I can figure out FOP2 would be a Bi--h to get working because of the way "lines' (Extensions to my way of thinking) are named [SIP/Garbage4nam3s] and from what I can see on default Incredible installed stuff once a password is set - it cannot be changes (its greyed out) and with HA setup you need two FOP2 licenses as if the main goes down so does FOP2 (twice the License fee).

Issabel Looks nice and Lets Encrypt works in that, as I cannot figure out certificates in Wazo, but when I added a desk phone c/P the password for some reason says it's not right and Locked me out (It has a built-in IPTables and Fail2Ban but due to Incredible being added too, now which has control as I made SURE I added my Home QTH (location) IP to the Jail.conf file of Fail2Ban and restarted - and STILL got locked out.

3CX is NOT an option as of even the free has limitations and I did read the NV article of 'marrying' Issabel and 3CX but since the extensions are on 3CX side the Limitations (I believe) would apply being the 10 extension limit and probably the simul calls -- I am NOT paying $100+ to lift them.

I am such at a loss I do not know where to go and the Wazo User Guide is 611 pages :explosion: (ouch, my brain) and that is way too much -- might as well learn straight asterisk dialplan manipulation as the Plugins are too. Issabel's problem is their forum is MAINLY spanish and NOT that great (Of course Wazo is French -- look at CTI server->presence and Phone Hints for what I mean).

If I could go back to what I had, I would but I want some of the NEW TTS engines IBM BlueMix and AmazonPolly (which Polly would only work in Wazo from what I was told) -- I could create Polly Outside for IVR and upload later but what about on the fly stuff?

I just don't know what to do, where to go, or what to use that won't send me into a rubber room. I like IncrediblePBX but am really lost now.

Got to go, the men in white coats just got here. Thanks.

 

[wardmundy]

Why not start with something you are used to? Incredible PBX 13 for CentOS 6 is a very stable product with the FreePBX GPL modules you've always used. There will be no problem loading FOP2.

 

[mainenotarynet]

It seems that is where I'm stuck with. Living in CentOS6 and NO new goodies for me because the newer stuff looks like they took everything they had and threw it in a blender so as no one can find the simplest fuctions and use them. I started the reinstalls from Incredible13/CentOS6 but want the NEw TTS and NEW other features that am told CentOS6 cannot do.

Stuck in dinosaur land for me it seems. Oh Well. No Polly, an HA (unless I want to pay three grand and I spent more money as CentOS 6 worked on the server I already HAD.

Anyone else have suggestions on how I can proceed?

 

[billsimon]

the newer stuff looks like they took everything they had and threw it in a blender so as no one can find the simplest fuctions and use them.

Curious what this refers to. FreePBX vs. Wazo?

 

[mainenotarynet]

Wazo and Issabel 4 -- some features are just plain missing.

 

[wardmundy]

The features are all there in Wazo. There is a learning curve just as there was with FreePBX. We've written more than a dozen articles documenting almost everything in Wazo. But you can't wing it.

As for Issabel, it's basically FreePBX 2.11 with lots of new features including CentOS 7.

 

[mainenotarynet]

As I said I can't find them -- the only reference to IVRs is in the config files (and that is a short list as compared to the /etc/asterisk folder in freepbx setups) and the only way to make one is dialplan code.

The http://<either IP or FQDN>/admin and plugins (IVR doesn't show anything INCLUDING the ivr1 that incredible install adds) the Wazo GUI has no mention of IVRs or Follow Me or any other 'feature' I'm used to seeing as a menu item. So you say it's there.. well I say again I CAN'T FIND THEM -- I want to use WAZO as I have it built and duplicated with HA using NeoRouter on a third box but I can't figure it out. Not intuitive at all - 611 page manual --Rubber room here I come.

As for the NV tutorials the articles reference other (older) articles which reference other (even older) articles -- I have to backtrack through 10 or 12 articles in order to figure out anything -- My definitive definition and yours must be exact opposites.

Guess I AM stuck with OLD implementations

 

[wardmundy]

As far as Nerd Vittles referencing previous articles, the idea is that there are building blocks in putting a complex system such as Wazo into production. It doesn't make sense to repeat the same text in every article just so nobody has to click on a link to drill down into specifics. I don't think there have ever been ten layers of drilling down. Usually it's one. See below for two examples.

You may not want a complex system, and that's fine. But, in that case, Wazo is probably not a good fit for your purposes. Having said that, once it is set up correctly, Wazo is an extremely powerful AND reliable platform with more than 10 years of development effort and very talented developers. The more robust a system becomes, the more complex are its components. Flying to the moon in a rocket is more complex than driving to the grocery store in a Chevy. It doesn't make either one a bad choice. It depends upon what your requirements are. If you want HA with FreePBX, it's $3,000 + hardware. With Wazo, the software is free and the hardware can be two $1/month cloud platforms.

Let's start with IVRs. XiVO became Wazo. They're identical. Here's the IVR tutorial: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=18183

If you don't like that methodology, Wazo's new admin/plugins interface provides a second way to make IVRs using an IVR GUI that is self-explanatory. Click to install the plugin and then IVR development is almost identical to FreePBX.

What else could there be to document IVRs??

Let's tackle HA next. Tutorial is here: http://nerdvittles.com/?p=19350

What else do you need to master HA with Wazo??

 

[mainenotarynet]

HA is what I have DONE and WORKS as I said -- its the ONLY thing I can figure out and as I said IVRs is NOT in the IPPBX menu to see and I DID load the IVR plugin in the http://<ip of PBX>/admin and DId your or Did you NOT make a demo ivr as part of the install if incredible? ivr1 is what you called it as a demo. Well that does not show up.

It may be powerful but so complex you HAVE to be a rocket scientist or lawyer to comprehend it.

I close this now -- cyclical redundency conversation.

 

[billsimon]

You want everything to look and feel like FreePBX and not have to deal with the costs of a commercial product or learning new ways of doing things... I think your path is FreePBX. If you don't want to use CentOS 6 -- why not build it with a newer OS then?

 

[jerrm]

You want everything to look and feel like FreePBX and not have to deal with the costs of a commercial product or learning new ways of doing things... I think your path is FreePBX. If you don't want to use CentOS 6 -- why not build it with a newer OS then?

He wants/needs a FreePBX based upgrade path for the IPBX 13 bundle. I do too, but it isn't coming, at least not from @wardmundy. Wazo is still missing features and depth that are old news in FreePBX. Many times the "bullet point" feature exists, but falls short of the real functionality. To be fair, Wazo does a lot of things much better than FreePBX.

IPBX 13 is still solid, and I don't think there is anything preventing newer tts from working with it other than Ward is not providing the new scripts for it as normal updates. @mainenotarynet would need to port the Wazo/Issabel scripts over. HA is another story, if some of the warm backup methods for FreePBX are not adequate, then Wazo gets a big boost up.

That said, IPBX13 is a little long in the tooth now. If starting from scratch, I don't know if I would spend a lot of development time on it at this point. My in house build is effectively frozen at this point, next year we will decide what to do going forward.

 

[wardmundy]

If you look under the covers of the newer releases of FreePBX, you will better understand why we stopped developing for that platform. A newer version of Issabel with newer versions of Asterisk and reportedly newer FreePBX GPL modules is under development so... hang in there if Wazo is too much to tackle.

 

[Sylvain Boily]

@mainenotarynet please let me know what we could enhance on wazo. We are open to listen and build with the community, so give us more informations, join our forum and talk with us. We are a small company and we do the best to give a best product to the community. Sometimes it's seems you forget that, a free software product need contributions to be better. Feedback with details is clearly very important.