Hi, Nice feedback... At present we are thinking of integration with Office365 and Google Gsuite for auto syncing of extensions...
Nick,
This sounds interesting. A bit of context and real world experience info for you...
As a large school, we have around 270 staff on our site (but I'm also responsible for several other schools who will probably eventually migrate to 3CX as well). During the academic year, there's quite a few trainee teachers who join us for either a few weeks, months or the whole year. Then there's long term cover, the natural cycle of people coming and going. All of these people need a phone extension - mostly for a softphone. That's quite a lot of people to provision, set up, tweak. I'm looking at doing this with a PowerShell script during the user creation process. At the moment, we use Lync 2010 / Skype for Business 2016 client (migrating to 3CX next month) and user creation, auto software login, assigning users to groups/profiles to pick up settings is probably one of its main pros (for its many, many cons).
With 3CX soft phone activation, it's even more of a chore as teachers roam around all day between PCs. We're scripting a way of provisioning the client for them, to at least mimic SfB like auto-sign in functionality. Having to get them to import their 3CX profile on each PC they use is not good/going to happen/friendly. I'm hoping the move to tighter security around this area doesn't break any possibility of this being done for them.
For me, regular account creation/deletion is a bit lacking in 3CX. Especially around user templates. We want different levels of staff to have different policies (e.g. 'Regular', 'Pro / Remote user', 'Senior Staff') and perhaps call policies too (e.g. Standard call policy, Premium calls allowed, International calls allowed) without having to tinker with lots of tick boxes for each person each time. Yes, it can be scripted but it's a bit of a fudge.
The soft phone itself is easily tinkered with. For the average user, there's a lot they can break. I'd prefer to be able to mandate / hide certain options, to KISS for them. We're even having to deploy the ringtones after the client has gone on, which are edited to be quieter as they're so loud!
Many, many schools have integration with O365/Azure/GSuite already. It's free for us. Some schools are starting to use Azure AD, others are using the SSO feature. We're using ADFS for authentication. Depending on what you're thinking, this could be quite a big positive step.
3CX looks great and I can't wait to migrate to it (we've already purchased and are setting it up). Lync 2010 Server has been a nightmare to admin, really petty, bloated and mixed UI rubbish at the backend. However, I'm a bit frustrated that the end user experience for soft phones and administering of users frequently coming/going is very much less slick than we have now.