Release Notes 3.0.1
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Agent Group and Hunt Groups
For small groups, it is difficult to maintain a constant service in agent groups. Having the phone ringing for a long time gives a bad impression to the caller. In order to cover these problems, the PBX now offers the option to continue playing the music on hold with the mixed IVR messages, even if the agents are ringing already.
The agent availability indication in the web interface was difficult to understand in version 3.0. Therefore, we changed it and made it much easier to understand.
As many people seem to like to put almost the whole domain into the first stage of a hunt group, this was creating hiccups especially on systems with a small CPU. Therefore we decided to put the CPU to sleep after each call setup. This should reduce the problems with CPU hiccups when the PBX is generating burst calls.
Provisioning
The security for the provisioning of devices was not satisfactory. Plus many phones do support the authentication scheme known from HTTP Basic. Therefore, we added this kind of authentication to the provisioning process.
There was also a small security leak with the MAC addresses. In hosted environments it was possible to "steal" MAC addresses from other domains. This would require the knowledge about the MAC address, however it was possible. In 3.1 MAC addresses can be only in one domain.
The PBX was "accumulating" PnP settings, even if they were not in use any more. Now those old settings are still present (in case they are used later again), but not shown in the web interface any more.
We also made it possible, that passwords come from the domain administrator, not the account that is being provisioned. Although this is not the default right now, it might come handy later when for example admin passwords for the phones should come from the admin account and not the user account.
Web Interface
The AJAX script was giving a hard time creating the same extension in different domains. That was corrected.
In the account list, the domain administrator can now download the account list in CSV format. This list includes the account name, the type and also the MAC address (if it is an extension). That makes it a lot easier to prepare documents that show what accounts are available in the domain.
When logging out, the user needed two attempts to log in again. That small glitch was corrected.
CDR
The interpretation of the PBX CDR was still a problem. Many people expect that the CDR match the carrier's CDR. However, the PBX tries to present CDR that are related to users. For example, when the call first goes into an auto attendant, then the carrier CDR would show a connected call, while the user-centric CDR would show this segment of the call as an attendant call and the call to the extension as a separate segment. We have to make the point here that CDR in relation to the trunk are not the CDR in relation to an extension.
Because we were already running out of symbols, we added a long format for the "simple CDR" format. This makes the strings also easier to read.
IVR nodes did not show up correctly in the CDR.
Cell Phone
There were some bugs when the PBX was forking the call to registered SIP phones and cell phones. For example, after intercepting an anonymous call, the PBX would call the cell phone twice if the inclusion time was set to "immediately".
Also, when the cell phone was used to place an outbound call, the PBX sometimes presented the Caller-ID of the cell phone, not the extension. The purpose was to hide it. That was fixed, an now users can use their cell phones to place outbound calls and present the caller-ID of the PBX.
Call Redirection
We added the possibility to specify a call redirection for the case that no user agent is registered. This feature was available on other products. Although we disagree that deregistering a phone should be a common feature (it is an indication that something is wrong in the network), there are cases when people are using softphones that are registered only if a PC is turned on and in those cases customers want to redirect calls to PSTN numbers.
We also added an exception for the redirection. If the source of a call is the destination of the redirection, then the PBX ignores the redirection. This makes it possible that the boss has a permanent redirection to an assistant; if that assistant calls the boss the phone will ring. This feature is sometimes also called boss-secretary function.
Startup
When the PBX encountered a fatal error message, it did continue the booting process in version 3.0. There were concerns that this behavior would make it difficult to locate severe problems (essentially when the PBX could not get important ports). That made us change the behavior and now the PBX does not start up under these conditions.
Also, we added a default configuration. When the system starts up the first time without any domain and without any system name, the PBX now automatically creates a reasonable default configuration that should save administrators time to get the system working.
There were a couple of problems with different email servers. First of all, it seems that there are still servers that do not support the EHLO message. For those servers, the PBX now falls back to the good old HELO message.
Then there are servers that don't wait for the QUIT command and just disconnect the service. That made the PBX believe that the connection was reset; and the PBX treated that email as "not delivered" and it tried to deliver the email. This way, emails got delivered one hundred times. Now the PBX just ignores the disconnect during the QUIT phase and assumes that the message has been delivered.
When sending out calendar events, there was a problem with the encoding of the message. That was leading to problems with some email servers. It seems that also queue status emails were affected by this problem.
3.0 introduced the possibility to encrypt the traffic between the PBX and the SMTP server. However, it turned out that there are some emails servers that actually require a client certificate. When the PBX presented the default certificate, the email was rejected. In order to solve this problem without having to buy an expensive certificate, we added the option to turn TLS off. The name of the setting is "smtp_starttls".
The settings for the email server can now be set for the whole system. The settings in the domain were misleading, especially in setups where there was only one domain.
Conference
A conference room may now have a specific language that may differ from the domain language. That makes it possible to set up "international" conference rooms where callers are greeted in a different language than the domain language.
SBC
The built-in session border controller does not accept registrations that run through a SIP proxy (it is then the proxy's job to take care about NAT). However, there is equipment out there that ignores this rule. We still believe that it is the right way to look at the via count, but if the administrator explicitly overrides this rule, then the PBX can also keep registrations alive by the SBC that have two or more "Via" headers. The name of the setting is "register_via_count".
Buttons
Customers expressed the wish to be able to pick up calls when using the BLF function of the buttons. Although this can lead to race conditions, we put this in. However, this functionality must be enabled by the global setting called "offer_pickup".
When the PBX was sending out a lot of messages to the different phones, it was internally looping requests. That could lead to a lot of CPU usage in a burst. Instead, the new version now uses just one request with all destinations in a list, which makes the sending much more efficient.
There was a bug when a user picked a call up from a queue that the LED would continue to blink. That bug should be fixed in 3.1.
When a button profile was set up or changed, the PBX would write the references to user names right at that point. When an account was created later or a name changed, the PBX did not update the reference. That was technically correct; however made life more difficult to the installer. So we changed it. Now when a new user is created or the user name changes, the PBX goes through the button profiles and updates the references.
License
The "end to end" security feature using the "sips" scheme is not sold as a separate license feature. It is now a standard feature of the system.
Pickup
When the PBX was searching for a call that could be picked up, the behavior was difficult to predict; if not random. The case where one company with two floors wants to define what extension can pick up calls in which floor was just too difficult to setup. Therefore, we introduced a new setting where the user can specify which accounts should be checked for pickup. This setting is similar to the list of park orbits.
Transferring Ringing Calls
When a ringing call that had more than one SIP device in early media state was transferred, the result was kind of random. For example, when an assistant received a call, then was calling someone who has three active registrations and hit the transfer button while hearing ring back tone, and one of the ringing devices would pick up, then the call might end up in one-way audio. That case was fixed successfully in 3.1.
Intercom
Now it is possible to use the intercom star code without specifying what extension to intercom. In this case the PBX would prompt for the extension number and then call this extension in intercom mode. This was a feature request that makes it possible to set up a simple speed dial button for intercom; without having to specify the extension already.
The intercom star code can now also start without a star. That makes it even easier to program intercom and can now be used like the mailbox calling feature (which also does not use a star).
Trunks
The trunks can now have a direction specification. This makes it a lot easier to set up hosted environments, where there is one global trunk that sends the call into the right domain and then each domain has one or more outbound trunks for calling out.
Address Book
The address book may now have two more fields. One field is the client matter code (CMC) and the other is a note field. The CMC code is inserted into the display name upon address book recognition. This makes it easier to do bookkeeping on calls. The note field can be used to take notes about a client. This feature will be extended in future versions.
Also, the address book entries are now internally written in a global format (+ notation). This will end the discussion about how to compare address book entries against incoming requests.
IP Address Black/Whitelist
We added the possibility to explicitly list IP addresses that are accepted by the PBX or that are explicitly rejected by the PBX. This is an important feature for hosted PBX where the provider knows the IP addresses of the customers. It simply tremendously reduces the risk of outside attackers to DoS the PBX.
ENUM
There was a problem with ENUM when the numbers were using the "+" notation. Now this problem seems to be fixed.
Pickup Preferences
In order to make it easier to define pickup preferences, we added a new setting on the extension level where the user may define what accounts should be searched when performing an undirected pickup. This makes it easier to set up groups, for example different floor in a company.
