3CX Roadmap & V18 alpha - Connecting Customers!

[Paul Reynolds]

Whilst it's always nice to see new features, and quality of life improvements like remote SBC provisioning is a big boon for partners, I do have to side with 3cxguy a little with the feeling that there's seems a lot of focus on things that aren't the actual phone system.

This year has brought an all out assault from things like Zoom and Teams, and I can't help but feel they've now won that war. They aren't trying to be and seem unlikely to ever be a fully fledged phone system/call centre. I've already had customers reducing potential 3CX expansions because they're using Teams for calls instead, but they recognise that Teams will never be a phone system replacement for their call centres. This is where 3CX needs to stand head and shoulders above the rest, particularly At Scale which is something we're struggling with currently.

It's a bit of a sore point so I kinda wish you hadn't mentioned it, but seeing as you did - ideas from Idea being implemented, is great, but the progress over there feels glacial. The average age of an In Progress request is something like 4 years. In Consideration is similarly protracted. Surely it doesn't take 5 years to decide if a feature will be implemented or not. Just give a yes/no and move on instead of dangling hope. Every few months I'll get a replied thread notification for some now long forgotten request and think "You poor naïve guy, that '+1' isn't going to tip the balance"

I can see 40 ideas marked as Implemented over 5 years. Which is great, but it's still only 8 a year. Surely the Ideas forum is an absolute gold mine of improvements that the people actually selling the systems know is what make people buy and -more importantly- keep 3CX.

Thanks

 

[N_G]

@Paul Reynolds - Well i beg to differ that the rate of features that we implement is "glacial" Thats quite an astonishing comment actually. As i already said we look at the top features and yes they take time to research and develop.

Where we beat teams is that we have a fully fledged call centre and contact centre. The focus these days is on customers. Hence live chat, helpdesk etc. I thought the blog post explained it.

"people actually selling the systems" and you think we are not selling 3CX?

 

[illcsales]

Hey Nick hope your well...
Merry Christmas to you and your family...
You mentioned: 3CX can easily bundle a good open source solution onto the existing Debian instance and make perfect integration.

What open source product are planning on integrating?

 

[Evolute IT]

The gateway service will be responsible for integration with third party systems such as CRM, our own Live chat, helpdesk, and these APIs that we use our selves will be made public (including samples). Kinda like a proxy for external systems. This should allow for much easier integration with many systems and make it more transparent. We admit this is an area in which 3CX needs improvement. The gateway service will provide this.

If it is possible, as soon as you have an alpha of the API, I would like to play with it! We do tons of integrations and the API is something we've been waiting for for a long time!

 

[ENCOM-GEFFRAY]

@Nick Galea

This is great news, these are great advances that are more a reflection of what we expect from 3CX.

As said by other integrator colleagues, we will certainly have to add other missing or corrective elements in order to address the large enterprise market with an AD/LDAP connector for user management.

Correct the distributions on competences which pose many problems and some other odds and ends which are requested since years.

3CX is a great product that deserves to fill its small flaws that would bring a lot of comfort.

Thanks to your R&D teams and support for their daily work and thanks to the sales managers for accompanying us.

 

[mcsphones]

I suppose I'm on the fence about the ticketing system. Frankly I don't see any of our 1200+ 3CX extensions at customers using that feature.

 

[SweetAction]

Hey Nick hope your well...
Merry Christmas to you and your family...
You mentioned: 3CX can easily bundle a good open source solution onto the existing Debian instance and make perfect integration.

What open source product are planning on integrating?

I'm guessing Zammad (https://zammad.org/)

 

[kent3]

@Nick Galea Have a Merry Christmas to all on the Forum and 3CX staff!!

Great to see the possibility of multiple phonebooks, as well as the support ticket development, this is great. Theyll soon only be one icon on your desktop, 3CX

 

[illcsales]

@SweetAction
I had seen zammad mentioned for integration before and believe I saw mention that 3CX already use it, just was not sure that was what Nick was referring to or if there was another product he had in mind.

 

[ewebster]

@Nick Galea This is a pretty awesome update, I am installing my dev environment now. I am really looking forward to all the new features. Keep up all the hard work, I really appreciate what your team has enabled myself and my clients to do with the 3CX platform.

 

[N_G]

@illcsales Thank you for the heads up and merry Xmas to you too! Before i confirm we would like to check the integration and feasibility in its entirety if that is OK with you. We should have more information january / february
@kent3 Thank you for the heads up and merry Xmas to you too!
@ewebster Thank you !
@SweetAction a pretty good guess but give us until january / february
@ENCOM-GEFFRAY Thanks for the nice words. For SSO it will be for sure 365/google or something oauth. I think Azure Active Directory supports the SSO we use. I think we have some AD integration already for user import....
@Frederick Marcoux Yes i think you will be happy with the API but its going to need more time....
@dougkinzinger Well its an optional component but i think many customers will value the ability to escalate a call or sms/live chat message for "tracked" follow up.

 

[Evolute IT]

Yes i think you will be happy with the API but its going to need more time....

No worries, just don't forget SMS APIs to trigger sending

 

[dredd0606]

Hey Nick, Merry Christmas! This list of new, upcoming features is fantastic, and will definitely help in some areas. SSO is massive, and going with MS/Google is a great idea as they both have MFA/2FA built in.

One thing I'd love to wish for is SMS integration with the largest SMS provider in North America, Bandwidth.com / VoxBone. Telnyx, Twilio, and Flowroute are a good start, but the elephant left out of the room currently is Bandwidth.com. Any chance we can see them added in the new year?

 

[CarAnalogy]

I too would love to see "apt install 3cx" so that we could install 3CX on Linux the same way we do on Windows.

 

[FireMedic]

When will we see MMS support? I'm looking to jump ship from Ring Central to 3CX/Flowroute as soon as SMS/MMS support is provided.

 

[amir_]

Tremendous feature set in a exceptionally cost effective solution. I've been a Cisco IPT engineer for 15 years. I've worked for Cisco resellers and at large Cisco enterprise clients. It is my opinion that 3CX will see more and more Cisco IPT clients migrate to 3CX. We will be one of those in 2021. I will be replacing 7 VMs and so many different GUI and CLI management interfaces I've lost count. The implementation / management complexity and ongoing licensing costs of Cisco IPT platforms are simply absurd. For my organization - we will not only reduce our IPT software / hardware costs - but perhaps more importantly -eliminate the need to hire dedicated Cisco IPT engineers simply to manage the "phone" system.

Well done Nick and team at 3CX.

 

[N_G]

@dredd0606 Merry Xmas to you too and thank you for your encouragement! Bandwidth.com is certainly one of the bigger ones but unfortunately when we last checked the API was a little akward. But given its importance we will definitely look into it again.
@CarAnalogy - no this option will never come back I am afraid for support reasons. With the ISO, hosted 3CX and PBX express i dont see the need either.....
@FireMedic - Yes MMS is a matter of time.
@amirsafayan - Great to hear! In my previous software company we actually owned call manager. Its extortionate pricing, complex admin actually gave rise to the idea to found 3CX!

 

[DFP]

MMS is a big one for us currently. Hoping its coming in 2021.

We also exited about the new help desk feature. Didn't see it coming, but will definitely use it once out.

 

[N_G]

@DFP Thanks! Yes MMS should be easy actually

 

[dalep]

Helpdesk sounds fantastic! Depending on how it already plans to integrate with email, it would be a great feature if you could mark an email as something to track in 3CX heldesk... Or even take over entire email inboxes such as sales@ and info@ email inboxes.
Our business is an SMB of 35 staff - we have investigated freshdesk/zendesk etc and done nothing to date as it isn't useful unless most of the staff have access - and that gets real expensive real quick...!