Trixbox Pro ????

Hmm I guess when Andrew has that Intel Capital monkey on his back something had to happen.
http://www.intelportfolio.com/cps/co_profile.asp?co_id=1444
Trixbox Pro: IP-Telephony software for resellers and integrators for developing customized solutions for small and medium businesses.

Definately spells if not the end of free Trixbox the beginning of some form of paid for version.

Dean

As you can see from the last few days of releases of 2.2.4 and 2.3, we are not even slowing down development of trixbox CE.

trixbox Pro is something different, its just another choice. There will even be a free version as well as paid versions of Pro. Now, anything else, you need to wait for Monday. :)

Thanks Clint,
Your points are well taken, however, they are only slightly off in this case. trixbox Pro is NOT simply a different support/release model for CE like many other open source projects do, trixbox Pro is something unlike anything you have seen so far. It is a major departure from the CE family. It has a LOT of benefits for people but may not be as flexible as some people may need, and those people will need to stay on CE. Pro is actually built on the needs and requests from resellers who are pushing a lot of systems.

Stability. reliability, automatic updates, professional interface look, branding, and much more.

CE simply does not fill the needs of everyone and nor will Pro, but for many people out there building businesses around the trixbox products, you will now have more to choose from. I have said many, many times that trixbox is about choice, and between CE and Pro, you now will have lots more choice. There will be people who always like CE better and those who like Pro better, again, its a matter of choice. CE is and always will be free, and the entry level version of Pro will be free. I can't wait to show it to you all (and might not be able to contain myself over the weekend) during the webinars on Monday and I certainly can't wait to hear your feedback.

Please tell me you are fix'n to make it so we can "TrixOut"
just any ole Centos box with a custom installer script built from a webpage of options.

any ole raid setup we can get working / on any box we can get centos 5 on.

Please tell me the ISO install is gone for the PRO...

To perfect the implementation of the pro, it will be wise to have an evaluation copy "freedownload" so that integrators can try it out and report bugs since majority of techs have different setups. What are the specs for the pro to attract a charge?

oooo Call Center Features???? - Sounds awesome.

Like good reports etc?

:-) You have almost told us what its all about now.

Question: Can someone have the ability to upgrade from CE to PRO ?

Welllllllllllllllll this will make for a LONG four days.

But you know, Kerry, if you just can't contain yourself, you can always e-mail with all the juicy details.........

I hope I can afford to play with all the neat enhanced features in the paid-for Pro version. ;) Like I need monitoring or to have a call center backend in my four extension sandbox.

I saw that webpage too 'cause I hadn't heard a thing about Trixbox Pro until I got that email...googled it up...kind of a secret, actually.

I can't make the conference due to travel, but hope to hear more in the coming week!

Come on, I can't give away all the details before the announcement but I will try to answer some specific questions.

Should you wait for pro?
I don't know, depends on your requirements

Can you upgrade between versions of Pro?
Yes, its a simple upgrade you purchase in the web interface and its automatic from there

Yes, it does operate like the Fonality PBXtra system.

OK,
now he has you all hooked, he will sit back and watch your "habit" eat at you,
by monday, you all will need bib's to keep the drool off your keyboards.

Does it support multi-tenant features?

I'm dying to see PRO, sounds great from all of your "slip ups"...

For those of us who have projects/prior engagements during the webinar...will it be available for replay? if so, when/how...

Kerry you are being silly cos you are the guy at asterisktutorials.com, it says it in you sig and at asterisktutorials.com unless there are 2 Kerry garrisons that both like trixbox hmmmm i dont think that would be likely. so that means that i will be looking at asterisktutorials.com all weekend to find out the news.
anyway I'm looking forward to tbp especially as we are getting closer to full implementation of tb(possibly tbp) in our callcenter (my first installation of many i hope).

Nice stuff but hardocp is correct. It's basically a re-branded PBXtra or more specifically a boxed software product that lets you install on a server so that you have a PBXtra machine. With the ability to re-brand it Fonality has an army of sales people selling PBXtra under their own name. As long as there is development on the CE product I don't have an issue but after looking at some other open source projects out there that have corporate sponsorship it seems that the coolest features never seem to make it to the open source product. Hat's off to you though... The Fonality CEO is one slick guy.

Will say only one thing

http://asterisktutorials.com/videos/tbpro/tpbtutorials.html

Happy viewing

Here I was keeping my mouth shut because I signed an agreement with Fonality to stay mum about things Pro until the official release. Silly me.

I backed out of the Beta of Pro because even though I had attended FtOCC, I'd have to attend again to be a reseller. Once the "SE" version is available I will certainly set one up and run it. But, I am very disappointed to be locked out by an FtOCC retake need.

From what I know, this is smart business on the part of Chris. trixboxPRO is an excellent program and it should help Fonality grow. The recent flurry of trixboxCE releases may have been timed to help dampen the fires (for some) about this direction. Maybe not :)

Still, I am still going to give Andrew and Kerry the benefit of the doubt. After all, the long view of Asterisk@Home to trixboxCE has been exceptional. There is no denying that.

Ooops, I uploaded the wrong version.

Can you recheck it. I am having an odd sizing issue on IE7 but it looks right on FF, need to know if its a caching thing on my side.

Greg,

Your points are well taken and let me address them,

1) Yes, this is an odd setup for some people and those that don't like it can stay on CE. However, it does provide for a LOT more than what you can do on a single customer prem install.
a) inherent backups
b) instant updates
c) simple upgrades
d) Alerting/notification
to name just a few.
The software service business is well proven and growing rapidly, take a look a Google office products as an example there. Should anything happen to Fonality, the software would become available via a software escrow.

2) How else do you charge for support? The more users there are, the more support there is, it is again a proven business model.

3) Not sure what point you are making here. HUDlite suffered development because it is a lose leader and not a revenue product not because its closed versus open, on the other hand HUD (pro) is highly evolved and stable.

I will continue to say this over and over, Pro is not for everyone the same way CE is not for everyone, it just provides you and your clients more choice. You are certainly not seeing all the features in the product but that is for another time.

What you don't see at all in the tutorial presentation are the three levels of the CE product. The entry level, SE (Standard Edition) that is missing only some call center and enterprise class features, is available for Free just like CE. We will also be launching the new website that will explain the reseller programs, training, and support as well. We think you will like the different plans, if not, we are quite sure people will tell us.

In the Trixbox Pro presentation of Asteriskguide says :
"TrixBox Pro uses a hybrid-hosted interface meaning the user interface is located in a data center on Fonality´s servers while the PBX server is located at the customer premise"

What happen if the intenet link is down or the TrixBox Pro is located at data center without internet link?.

That question is because we have many remote IP PBX with satellite link to internet (thats low speed and very high delays) in the jungle, they have high speed lan/mans (via wireless and fiber optic) for internal communications.

In the menu Options-Link Server. Can i link the Trixbox pro server with remote Trixbox 2.2 servers or Asterisk 1.2/4 servers or only between TRixBox Pro servers?.

thanks your answer

Victor
www.renttec.net

In the area I live we take emergency preparations seriously and not having the ability to manage a system that (because it is connected to POTS) still functions.... Won't work.

Like Kerry says "Pro might not be for everyone and CE is going to remain available..."

So, I'll try Pro, but in my region and when each install must have survivability (the ability to make a change to fit the situation) I can't use it. That is not to say the product is bad, I actually like it quite a bit. The no manage without internet is a deal breaker for me, thats all.

CE for me. Thanks.

It will be available on the appliance. We will have skus for both CE and Pro.

at the very least, an attempt is being made to turn our community into resellers for fonality. I'm sure from your perspective this isn't rational, after all you've announced the "free" pro version, and Trixbox CE will remain. But still, and i'm not making any judgments yet, it seems lines are being crossed now that fonality is using the Trixbox name for profit and closing off parts of the code.

I know there have to be pressures on fonality to monetize their sponsorship, but they should be very, very careful. There are many, many active contributors here who donate what must amount to hundreds if not thousands of hours per month of essentially free labor, helping others and making Trixbox a better product. I'd hate to see anything happen to this ecosystem.

I know you (and quite a few others here) are excited about this new product, and I will certainly give 'Pro' a try. But please during the webinar pay some attention on what 'Pro' means (and doesn't mean) for our community, and that fonality understands these concerns as well.

Have a great weekend!

They've worked their butts off. They are offering a good product and they are offering a free version and a paid version.

If some people spent the time they use to complain actually doing something, just imagine what they could accomplish.

I think it's great. I understand it, I look forward to it. From the Tutorial, it looks awesome. We've developed a lot of custom software and interface is important. The new one is simply awesome!

I realize this is a little hard to describe and make sense of, but trixbox Pro have been a MAJOR development effort apart from Fonality's PBXtra. Yes, they do share a common heritage and a common code base, however, trixbox Pro takes it to another level. Let me try to explain...

PBXtra is a hardware/software bundle, it is totally unflexible in what hardware you can use, including which phones you can use. You cannot even setup your own phones, they come pre-configured when you buy the phones from Fonality (the only way to get them). PBXtra is designed to be sold to end users and installed with very little IT or telephony knowledge.

trixbox Pro is sold as a software license only, you can install it on any platform that you choose. You can also use any hard or soft phone to connect to it and never have to go through us to have that done. You can also manage and add new PCI cards anytime you want. This makes it extremely friendly to the existing trixbox users who don't need a pre-packaged system, it also allows you to make more margin on the server and the phones.

trixbox pro also has a complete branding engine, you can change virtually every image, color, software name, and company name in it. You can also point a host name to it for your users to access the user portal and would never know it was trixbox Pro from Fonality. It can be SoHoPBX by Kerry's Telco if you want.

Resellers who do a master branding scheme can simply add new servers into their account and they will inherite the branding.

PBXtra will only work with Sangoma cards where trixbox Pro will support Sangoma as well as Rhino and Digium cards.

While you could look at the interfaces and see a lot of similairities, there are a LOT of differences under the hood that were designed specifically for the trixbox resellers. Many PBXtra resellers are going to switch to trixbox Pro because of the things I have already mentioned.

There is a number of other differences that I will be posting over the next couple of days. We have said it is based on the same technology, but they are very seperate beasts now.

We are planning on working with Pika on both Pro and CE. Our engineers are already working together.

Subject says it all... If Trixbox can do full Radius AAA against some commercial an non-commercial billing systems, then it'll have serious potential in my book.

Well I was very silent as I agreed to when you first announced Trixbox Pro to us Ftocc members over a month ago but now I get to voice my very opinionated mind. Trixbox Pro is basically Fonality's PBXtra with the name Trixbox on it. For everyone who does not know it is a hybrid hosted system which means all the config and web interface is on Fonality's servers and all config changes are made through there web interface on there server and pushed to your local box which means a couple things
1. If your internet or there internet goes down you can not make ANY changes. Or god
forbid they go out of business good luck making changes.
2. If you log into your box on the Command Line and make any changes the minute you make a change on there web interface it overwrite all the changes. Which means no more custom applications that we all love.
3. All features and changes come from Fonality and they have made it clear that they are not cutting edge. No more FreePBX.
4. The Free version of Trixbox Pro has limited features and no Call Center applications. Your have to upgrade to the paid version for the better features.
5. The best part as I remember is the 2 paid versions are $10.00 and $20.00 per ext, per month. Boy will that add up quick. Someone like me who has 5 different Ext on my system would be $50.00 or $100.00 a month.
6. Limited Features again such as No Fax support, 1 conf bridge, 1 blast/ring group and many others.
7. If I remember right a charge of like $700 to connect remote servers to each other.
8. On the positive they have added over 1 million lines of code and over 200,000 line of that code as asterisk based codes. Should make the system more stable. My only question is why haven't these codes and patches been given back to us the community under the GPL. If asterisk really needed 200,000 lines of code to make it stable these should be released back

If I miss stated anything Please forgive me Kerry as I know you will correct me. This product may be right for some people but it will not be for me. I am not stating this with no facts as an EX PBXtra customer after 4 months of my system I gave up on it and deployed my own box. Well a year later and over 100 customer using our Distro things are great. I will always support the true Open Source movement of the Asterisk Community and am so greatful for all the hard work of guys like Andrew, Kerry and Philippe and I lok forward to seing you guys at AstriCon.

If anyone is interested in seeing our Wall Mount Cabinet that we have developed and manufactured in the Good Old Wisconsin please PM me. Our first 200 preordered cabinets will be shipping August 27th and we will have another 200 a week later. We have installed this cabinet in 8 different locations in the last month and everyone of our customer love them.

Tony Lewis-Ftocc
www.schmoozecom.com

Tony and other folks,

Great post. Let me reply to each of your concerns, one by one:

Monthly Cost
You don't have to buy trixbox Pro as a monthly service. You can buy it as a life-time license if you wish. We only made the monthly service option so that very small businesses could control cash-flow and have a controlled/predictable expense line. This is the allure of hosted PBX services. Smaller businesses don’t have a lot of free cash to buy a PBX up-front. So, the recurring option with a low monthly rate tends to be a nice option. It is also great for the IT consultants that are offering "managed services" on a recurring basis to their customers. Don’t like the recurring option? No problem -- buy the lifetime option. Don’t want to pay at all? No problem: use trixbox Pro Standard Edition – it’s free. Don’t like Pro? No problem, use trixbox CE.

trixbox Pro has a FREE option
If you don't want to pay for trixbox Pro, then use the trixbox Pro Standard Edition which is free. We put lots of great features in there and it should be suitable for small businesses. It doesn't have every feature, but it is still compelling - and it is free.

trixbox Pro overwriting your local configuration files
Yes, this is intentional. After 3.5 years of selling PBXtra, the #1 problem we used to encounter was people making changes to .conf files and not realizing that they were breaking things in other areas of their PBX. Asterisk’s greatest strength is its flexibility. This is also its greatest potential weaknesses as it is easy to mis-configure and break. Also, remember, we have to *support* this thing. And if we can’t get a predictable configuration, we cannot offer low cost support. See, every trixbox CE is totally different and it makes it super expensive to offer unlimited annual support on. Our goal is to continue to lower the cost of support…and predictable configurations are required to do such. FYI: the .conf eco-system we have built is also very elaborate and feature-rich, and seemingly minor changes to certain .conf files can and does create side-effects.

Can I write custom applications on trixbox Pro?
Yes! On the two paid editions you can write AGIs in any language you wish. No restrictions.

Asterisk Code
You didn’t quite state our code count right. Asterisk 1.2 is around 200,000 lines of code. Fonality’s application layer is around 1,300,000 additional lines of code. As for actual lines of Asterisk modified code, we are at around 10,000.

Releasing code back to the GPL
Of course our Asterisk changes are GPL. As Asterisk is natively GPL, any modifications to it are also “copylefted”. Per the GNU GPL requirement, we put our Asterisk source code on every box in a /source directory. You own our improved Asterisk code as much as we do.

That being said, we choose not to *sign* these changes back over to Digium via their waiver process. Why? Well, Digium mandates that you must sign this waiver in order to have your changes included in the formal release of Asterisk. Here is the catch: signing this waiver gives Digium the unlimited and binding-right to *sell* your code to anyone under their “Business Edition License”. Here’s the twist on that. People that buy this license from Digium can use your code, improve it, and don't have to give it back to you, or the general Asterisk community. In fact, as long as they continue to pay Digium an annual “maintenance fee” they can continue to “pull” new code from the community, improve it, and not give their changes back. In essence, this “waiver” builds a Chinese wall between the open source community and commercial companies improving the Asterisk code. How do we know so much about this? Well, we originally signed this “Business Edition License” with Digium. But, after we came to understand it better, we chose not to enact the license and instead allowed our signed agreement to expire. It just made us very uncomfortable as we considered this waiver very much *not* in the spirit of Open Source. We aren’t the only ones. Look around a bit, there are *lots and lots* of individuals and companies that don’t participate in this waiver process.

“Fonality is not cutting edge”
Bah. You misunderstand what we mean by that. What we mean is: we won’t use beta or beta quality code, be that code in Linux, Asterisk, or anywhere else. Just because a company launches a new version of code, doesn’t mean it is ready for prime-time. A PBX that needs a reboot or crashes is not a reliable solution. For this reason, we stress test every single feature in our extensive hammers. And, most things we stress test tend to fail in the beginning – requiring a lot of work on our part to harden them. This is why we don’t yet use Asterisk 1.4. It, quite simply, doesn’t survive our hammer. It took us over a year and almost 10,000 lines of Asterisk code changed to get 1.2 as stable as we got 1.09.

Now, let me tell you this: we do offer tons of really cool features in our applications and consider them quite “cutting edge”. We don’t sit around and code hand puppets. ;) HUD is an example of this. So is our new system monitor and alert system. Our auto-card detection and configuration system is another. Our branding system is pretty cool too. You might also take a peek at our call center reports which are excellent and deployed in over 1,000 call centers.

Poke around a bit in trixbox Pro before branding it as “not cutting edge”. To cut to the chase: the PBX business can be rough. People *sue* over their phone system not working. We don’t want you sued by your customers and we don’t want to be sued by anyone either. For this reason, we are super responsible about code we release that can critically impact the premise PBX. If that means that trixbox Pro implements Asterisk 1.4 later than some other distros, so be it. Use CE if you must have the latest and greatest of every Open Source release. Pro is here to provide you a fully tested platform that you can roll into 100 businesses and put bread on your table.

“Your have to upgrade to the paid version for the better features.”
Yep. Its pretty important that we get rent paid, so we do actually have to sell something. We make trixbox Pro Standard Edition free, and put call center and larger enterprise features into the paid editions. I would love it all to be free, but, the utility company must be paid…

“This is PBXtra with a green interface.”
Yes, and no. It is true that Pro has all the features and benefits of PBXtra. But it also has a number of features that PBXtra does not have. For instance: card auto detection and configuration, interface card port configuration, IP phone device auto-configuration, co-branding, full re-branding, pushing dial-plan changes directly to phone, bundled HUDlite or HUD Pro (PBXtra users pay for HUD as a separate fee).

“No Fax support”
Correct. In our test environment, using software faxing (where the data travels through the Asterisk daemon), we haven’t yet been able to have 100% success rate with fax delivery. We can get 90, 95, 98, even sometimes 99% fax delivery. But, try selling faxing to a mortgage company who gets 10,000 faxes a month and tell them that “1% won’t arrive because of software”. That fax can be worth $10,000! So, we are working hard on faxing, and when we have a solution we are proud of, we will put it into Pro. So, if you want to run fax machines off of FXs ports expect to not have the same delivery rate as independent faxing. Now, if you want to run faxing off of T1 card into a channel bank, where the fax data doesn’t leave the TDM bus, you will get very good results. We do support that configuration. Learn more here: http://help.fonality.com/index.php/Fax_Machine_and_Modem_Support_in_PBXt...

"If your internet or there internet goes down you can not make ANY changes."
Correct. However the PBX continues to function as normal during this period. It still makes and receives calls, voicemail works, the queues work, everything. All that doesn't work is moves, adds, and changes while your Internet is down. If you plan on installing in a business that does not have reliable broadband, then trixbox Pro is not a good fit. Most decent sized businesses have very good Internet and the couple of hours per year it goes down is not a big deal (so what if a few hours per year you cannot add extensions?).

trixbox Pro has hosted configuration files
You listed the negatives about this. Now let me list the positives:

1. You (and the employees of the PBX) can manage it from a web browser remotely using the secure tunnel that connects to trixbox Pro. You don't have to open ports in firewalls, and create security hazards or honey pots on your customer’s networks. This also means your users can use the Web User Panel from home or the road to listen to voicemail, view call logs, click-to-call-people back, set call forwarding, view call center reports, and more. It is *very* convenient for admins and users. You can also manage multiple branch offices from one screen.

2. Our data center, via a patent-pending registration process, makes setting up and maintaining remote/telecommuter phones a breeze. No need to worry about Session Border Controllers, STUN, turn, NATs, etc. Our data center also keeps track of dynamic IP addresses for the PBX so your customers can even have their IP addresses change and the telecommuter phone will automatically re-register when the 10 min TTL expires.

3. Fonality is able to *auto-update* your premise PBX and the hosted feature set of the Web Interface. This includes security patches to Linux, Asterisk, and SIP (we all remember the SIP Denial of Service vulnerabilities recently? Fonality was able to patch 2,000 servers in a single night). Our system also allows us (with your permission) to update firmware on your IP phones. It also includes features and bug fixes to the Web Interface. See, once you start getting lots of PBXs deployed, it becomes a major time sink to keep them all up to date. We really have that taken care of with our auto-patch system giving you more time to SELL and make MONEY. Of course, you have to authorize any changes to the actual premise PBX (so we don't end up affecting your box without your permission each time).

4. Fonality’s data center is able to do some of the heavy-lifting for your premise PBX, allowing it to focus 100% of its resources on processing calls. Specifically, running big reports is super painful on a CPU and is done by our data center’s high-availability MySQL load-balanced cluster. We all know that a complex table join query can bring any database to its knees. Oh, if you don’t like our remote reporting feature, you can opt out with a single click in the Web Control Panel. We also offload the GUI to our data center and most of the apache work. This *seriously* frees up your premise box. We have been selling PBXtra on Celeron processors and 256 MB of RAM for 3 years (for the little sales)!

5. Here is the big one: SUPPORT. More than half of the calls we get every month at Fonality (and we currently get over 2,000) have to do with problems on the network, phones acting squirrelly, or deep stuff on the Asterisk box. Our support center, because of our hybrid-hosted architecture is able to diagnose these problems very quickly and offer you expert help. Remember, we aren’t on site, and our hybrid-hosted architecture gives us the ability to rapidly assist you in case of trouble.

6. Remote Monitoring – we track the health of your box. Most things we can auto-correct, such as Asterisk deadlocking or cards giving errors. And things we cannot correct, we notify you of: such as a RAID disk going bad. This remote monitoring is a direct byproduct of our hybrid-hosted architecture.

Let’s talk HUDlite and HUD Pro – which are both bundled with trixbox Pro
I have said all along: HUDlite does not work perfect on CE because HUD was authored for our commercial platform and then ported to trixbox CE. For this reason, HUD works *amazing* on trixbox Pro. See, we have HUD installed at over 1,500 sites at Fonality. The HUDlite mishmash you have been using on CE has been very painful for us to watch and very difficult for us to correct (they are just written for different versions of Asterisk and also don’t respond well to the seemingly unlimited configurations of a trixbox CE deployment).

“If anyone is interested in seeing our Wall Mount Cabinet that we have developed and manufactured”
I am thrilled you are building Asterisk appliances and wish you great success doing so. I just want to make sure that your motivations are not to hurt Fonality’s business to better your own. trixbox Pro is a great solution, and if it is not right for you, that is perfectly cool. We will keep sponsoring CE and hopefully you can keep making a great living off of it!

To awoof who wrote: “I hope that fonality don't drive away the good guys.”
Hey, we are the good guys too! ;) We have been doing great things for CE: recently we released 2.4 beta, have offered you guys paid support on CE, have built a trixbox appliance, and have been really working to keep a great site and forum for you. trixbox Pro is simply intended to help resellers build a great business using a fully commercial Asterisk-based PBX. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember, everyone in this space has to pay rent. Polycom and Aastra and GrandStream create for-profit phones. Sangoma makes line cards. Digium created a commercial version of Asterisk, they also have created an appliance. We are here to win together. As I said, we are the good guys too, so please don’t drive us away. ;)

We are pleased that Fonality is sponsoring the Trixbox community, but at the same time compelling technical guys to become resellers. Please don't take away our little know how and avenue to learn some more skills. Installing and configuring Trixbox in various topologies, compilation and integration of codes if need be, is the motivation and thrill we have. I hope that Fonality will consider making room for us integrators to be involved in deploying the Pro version and improving our skills and not just selling. Don't get me wrong "awoof" wants to make some bread too. The more knowledge we gather from the forum and the actual participation in deploying new products to different arenas will increase our profitability. What I am saying is we want to be more involved in the technical aspect rather than becoming full time marketers. Hey, we are the ones in the field, we gather business requirements and recommend solutions to meet business needs.

Wondering when Trixbox will be ready for international markets. ...Inovative strategy is the key to success in a competitive world. Good Job.
Just curious, How many subscribers can the Pro version handle?

One thing you didn't address is that current FtOCCers will have to attend another FtOCC in order to become a reseller. When, during a conference call with a couple of your marketing people, they told me this I lost interest in participating in the beta of Pro. Hey, I was just down there. I can only get so much time away and I have some Cisco courses on deck that will tie up my travel budget for the next year.

When I heard the margins ( I am a low volume shop) I really didn't want to invest my time.

One example is a system I putting together now. 40 phones (Just under $15K) with trixboxCE. If I went Pro that would add $10K to a $15K system.

If the margins were better, then I could fudge that (take less for myself) and make the sale. But they are not and I can't take that route. Partially, because I don't qualify to be a reseller and partially because there are compelling alternatives and lastly because I was hoping that a trixboxCE Appliance and Support reseller program (that we were promised at FtOCC) would be available and this has not been created.

What happened there?

Compared to what? Compared to CE, correct. Compared to competing PBX systems from the big iron companies, incorrect. The cost of a fully loaded Call Center Edition is still a fraction of the cost of most any competing system.

The issue about losing internet connectivity and not being able to make changes seems a little odd to me. As an IT consultant most of my life and having done a fair number of aah/trixbox installs, I know that the number of PBX setting changes that occurs is very low, hell, my very first install I ever did years ago has NEVER made a single change to their system. Go to http://ehobbies.com, find their phone number, call it, who do you hear? ME, from when I recorded their initial call menu two years ago. Here is a situation that I find a little inplausible....I'm sitting in the backyard drinking a Corono with my feet in the pool (ok skip that part) and my phone rings with a hysterical client freaking out that their internet is down and they say "Kerry! We need you immediately! Our internet is down, we can't get any emails, our assitants can't do any research, and the boss can't get to his porn!! The VPN to the main office is down, our remote users phones are dead....please change the new secretary's voicemail password RIGHT NOW!!"

My point being, that a) changes are rare and almost never an emergency and b) getting a client's internet service restored is always going to be a priority over making changes to their phone system.

The point about secure facilities and systems not having the ability to have ports availabel for the VPN to connect to the Fonality data center. Absolutely agree with you, Pro is not going to work there. Again, we have said its not for everyone.

Here is another way I look at it. When you buy a Mitel, Shoretel, Avaya, etc system you are getting a PBX, that's it, nothing more. The way I look at the trixbox products now is that trixbox CE is an application platform and trixbox Pro is a PBX. If your clients need a reliable PBX that is cost efffective against other brands, Pro is a great product. If you need an application platform that you can enhance, extend, customize, etc, then CE is the right now.

As for the reseller programs, we will be giving you more information on that this coming week with all the details.

I am not going to discount your concerns but I just don't see them the same way or I would never have allowed this product to come out under the trixbox name. There are PLENTY of examples of companies that have closed source products in an open source community, to name just a few...Digium, mySQL, SugarCRM, Red Hat.

Am I right and you are totally off-base? Only time will tell. We will adapt and adjust according to the community as we always have. If you don't think I didn't lose a lot of sleep over this, there you would be mistaken. I can't count the number of times I had to stand up and say "No! we can't do xxxxx because the community won't go for it". Look at my new title, Community Director, you are absolutely right, I am the public face of the project and I am soley responsible for the intersection of the community, the product, and Fonality.

Back in november, how many people raised eyebrows about me joining Fonality, how many times did I hear that I "sold out" or "went to the dark side" and at the same time other said "well, if Kerry is on board, maybe Lyman isn't a complete evil bastard after all". You guys gave me and the company a chance and we have stepped up and done some cool things with trixbox and we continue to do even more. So once again, I ask you to take a step back, look at the big picture here, not just Fonality's big picture, but look at yours, look at telephony, look at the change in communications. On Monday, download Pro, take a look, explore the pricing model, make comments, make suggestions. It's not perfect, it's not for everyone, and it's not for every client, but it will allow you to offer more products to your clients.

I was in your shoes last year, I had a small IT business selling trixbox systems, I know what its like out there and my entire goal here is to help YOU be successful. You guys needed more products, you needed more support, you needed hardware, you needed training, you need discounts. Our mission is to provide you with tools to help you grow your business...period. If you succeed, we succeed.

I will be totally honest here, I took a look at PBXtra when I was looking into phone systems to sell, and frankly, I wasn't impressed, Fonality has done a poor job of telling people like you how cool the product really is. With trixbox Pro, it really takes it to another level by giving you the control you need to make even more margins and have more hardware control. There really is so much more to it than we have talked about or shown yet and all I can do is ask that you let me show you just how good the product is.

trixbox Pro margins are up to 50%
PBXtra was sold as a hardware/software bundle. Fonality's margins on the hardware (even after markup) were not good. Therefore the max margin we could give the reseller was 25% and still have a business. Welcome to the hardware biz. ;(

trixbox Pro is sold as a software-only. This means we can offer the reseller community up to 50% margins (based on volume). This means Enterprise Edition will be $4.99 per month and Call center Edition will be $9.99 per month. You can sell it for anything you wish.

This also means *you* can sell the hardware and mark it up and retain 100% of that markup (as you to today).

OMG, I cannot do a move/add/change when my Internet is down
My comment to this is: how many hours per year is your Internet really down? And what is the statistical probability that you will need to make change in the GUI during that time? Answer: statistical improbability. That being said, let's say your Internet does go down....your trixbox Pro will still work, your HUD will still work. You should be more concerned that your email just stopped working and your VoIP won't work then you should that you cannot do a move/add/change in the Web-interface during this period.

But, let's envision this emergency scenario where your Internet is down and you *must* change the routing of an extension. Fine: walk over to the box (you can't SSH in because your Internet is down remember), log into it via the console, modify the .conf file. Just remember to do it in the Web Admin Panel when your Internet returns. Again, Pro is *not* for a deployment that does not have broadband or that has broadband that is down for weeks at a time. For those customers, CE is a perfect fit.

trixbox Pro cannot be sold to gov't/secure facilities because its hybrid-hosted
Not true. PBXtra (also hybrid-hosted) is currently sold into numerous banks, medical facilities, and even the US Army. It is a no-brainer to put your PBXtra on a physically or logically separated net or subnet. Remember, most of these facilities already use some sort of ASP (software-as-a-service).

In fact, I have a friend who started an ASP aimed specifically at selling into gov't and local municipalities. His company is growing like crazy doing just that! Salesforce.com has a nice little ($5B) business where they host company’s sales data. You don’t think sales data is considered pretty valuable information? ;)

The advantage of salesforce is that your whole sales team can use the software from anywhere (the office, home, or the road) using a web browser. It unites the salesforce. Trixbox Pro’s hybrid-hosted does the same thing. It lets Admins and Users configure the PBX or their extension from anywhere using a web browser.