Thanks for the feedback.
Its not easy and not for everybody. But it allows us to add functionality relatively quickly without having to test the call manager each time which is a massive thing. So in a sense its also for us. But a good developer can do a lot of stuff with the call flow scripts.
The visual CFD was cute with its 90s interface but the way forward is AI. We just dont have the time yet but I think we have shown our development speed.
The latest version of the script is in the store, not in the blog. thats just to add some context
IMHO (don't know how the rest of the community feels about this, so please take this lightly), this is good in some cases and bad in other cases.
In this particular case, where the holiday functionality was manageable via the web ui or CFD for more complex setups, it's a step back.
I'd say about ~50% of our customer requests during the year are about setting up holidays or forwards to other queues during periods of time, and this takes time.
Some users were skilled enough to set up their office closure by themselves in v18, record their audio and schedule the holiday. As of now they have to open a request to us because they don't have the ability to do this anymore.
I'm currently trying to adopt the suggested methods, but I'm struggling to get them working (as seen from my posts above).
Also this approach doesn't seem to address some of the situations that we use CFDs to manage.
An example is a customer with a single trunk with multiple DIDs
- Office A has 2 of these DIDs
- Office B has 1 DID and is located in another area
- They share the same departments (administration, sales, warehouse)
-They have different holidays (like saint's day) occurring on different dates. How can I apply the different holidays if the script runs when receiving the call at the trunk level and not the single DID?
-How can I handle office B asking this: for the month of December the administration deparment will be closed all saturday afternoons, while office A remains operational
-How to handle Office A sales department asking for forwarding calls to sales queue of office B.
-Sales will have extraordinary opening hours on sundays on X dates.
Before starting developing CFD apps to manage these requests, this was done by my colleagues using "fake" extensions, and switching the status to open/close the inbound calls, this was not schedulable and we had to set notifications to switch back the extension status.
Basically for the customers with these kind of requests we put the whole call flow before the queues in CFD apps, but as you said this is heavy on the pbx and has me worried we are not on the right track, but we don't have the skill necessary to develop a c# script to do the same thing we can do with the CFD app that requires only basic flowcharting knowledge.
Being pretty new with voip and having only started about 3 years ago with 3CX, I never quite understood why is there no call control object that works as a calendar/date-time object with the functionalities where we can select dates, date ranges and the destination. The pieces seem to be all there, we could just have an object that we can insert anywhere in the call flow and control the destination based on dates. I think all the requests I posted above would be handled by such an object
sorry for the long post and again, this is not a rant, just some considerations from a voip neophyte who is trying to understand the correct way to achieve what our customer are asking on a daily basis
