Q3 2022 Top Forum Contributors Announced!

[VaneshaP_3CX]

We are happy to share the names of our five top forum contributors for our quarterly giveaway. With over 1,000 posts between them just in the last quarter, our winners have been invaluable to the 3CX Community offering continuous advice, guidance and expertise. Here are our stellar Q3 forum contributors:

• bitn2
• fxbastler
• Saqqara
• S...

Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

[ipt_dude]

The forum is a great place unless you have a large simultaneous call license like we do (96) and extensively use Call Flow Designer to manage your IVRs. Then you have NO OPTION but to have a "private cloud" or a "on-premise" instance of 3CX and don't benefit from the forums. This changes AFTER we migrated our telephony environment from Cisco to 3CX and was one of the things that our staff would always compliment about 3CX. "The forum is great, you post a question and within an hour or so, you have an answer" Not any more for us. We now ONLY have the option of paying 75.00 / ticket for email support directly from 3CX - no thanks. Or engaging a reseller for some type of annual support contract which will likely equal the cost of our annual 3CX 96 sim call license cost.

 

[Evolute IT]

The forum is a great place unless you have a large simultaneous call license like we do (96) and extensively use Call Flow Designer to manage your IVRs. Then you have NO OPTION but to have a "private cloud" or a "on-premise" instance of 3CX and don't benefit from the forums. This changes AFTER we migrated our telephony environment from Cisco to 3CX and was one of the things that our staff would always compliment about 3CX. "The forum is great, you post a question and within an hour or so, you have an answer" Not any more for us. We now ONLY have the option of paying 75.00 / ticket for email support directly from 3CX - no thanks. Or engaging a reseller for some type of annual support contract which will likely equal the cost of our annual 3CX 96 sim call license cost.

You should contact us. We support businesses like yours without contracts. And we're partner so we get tickets already.

Also, the forums will continue to be great as long as the community continues to support each other like we always do

 

[SweetAction]

The forum is a great place unless you have a large simultaneous call license like we do (96) and extensively use Call Flow Designer to manage your IVRs. Then you have NO OPTION but to have a "private cloud" or a "on-premise" instance of 3CX and don't benefit from the forums. This changes AFTER we migrated our telephony environment from Cisco to 3CX and was one of the things that our staff would always compliment about 3CX. "The forum is great, you post a question and within an hour or so, you have an answer" Not any more for us. We now ONLY have the option of paying 75.00 / ticket for email support directly from 3CX - no thanks. Or engaging a reseller for some type of annual support contract which will likely equal the cost of our annual 3CX 96 sim call license cost.

Plenty of partners here that work on a T&M basis and don't do contracts. But even if not (yes, I've seen the banner), the forums still work and 3CX still responds to posts. For example, here is a post from today that was replied to by a 3CX employee in the on-prem forum: https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/sbc-installation-log-files-on-debian.117131/post-542728

There never was a guarantee of support via forum and likely never will be. Nothing has really changed in that aspect except 3CX pushing to moved to hosted if applicable.

 

[ipt_dude]

Plenty of partners here that work on a T&M basis and don't do contracts. But even if not (yes, I've seen the banner), the forums still work and 3CX still responds to posts. For example, here is a post from today that was replied to by a 3CX employee in the on-prem forum: https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/sbc-installation-log-files-on-debian.117131/post-542728

There never was a guarantee of support via forum and likely never will be. Nothing has really changed in that aspect except 3CX pushing to moved to hosted if applicable.

Hi SweetAction. I have no issues with 3CX and the move to a hosted model. In fact, if 3CX supported our 96 sim call license and if they supported CFD usage, I would have migrated our PBX to 3CX hosted.

 

[SweetAction]

Hi SweetAction. I have no issues with 3CX and the move to a hosted model. In fact, if 3CX supported our 96 sim call license and if they supported CFD usage, I would have migrated our PBX to 3CX hosted.

I certainly see the appeal of moving to Hosted and letting 3CX deal with it. I don't think they will allow CFD on hosted in it's current form as it would provide access to parts of the system they want to restrict.

In fact, 3CX appears to be moving away from CFD as much as possible. Depending on your flows, maybe their upcoming changes will have you no longer need CFD.

I imagine the 32SC limit for hosted is artificial and can also be removed by 3CX at any time.

Can I ask - what about Hosted is appealing to you? Is it cost? Having 3CX handle it? Something else?
Some private/public cloud providers might be a fit for you depending on the needs.

 

[ipt_dude]

I certainly see the appeal of moving to Hosted and letting 3CX deal with it. I don't think they will allow CFD on hosted in it's current form as it would provide access to parts of the system they want to restrict.

In fact, 3CX appears to be moving away from CFD as much as possible. Depending on your flows, maybe their upcoming changes will have you no longer need CFD.

I imagine the 32SC limit for hosted is artificial and can also be removed by 3CX at any time.

Can I ask - what about Hosted is appealing to you? Is it cost? Having 3CX handle it? Something else?
Some private/public cloud providers might be a fit for you depending on the needs.

Recently, we lost access to our fiber connected datacenter and had no dial tone as a result. That brought on the overall discussion of migrating various services ( MS Desktop applications to O365 ) to the cloud. I've got a Zoom Phone license with 30 numbers which I'm investigating. Zoom Phone would replace both our Flowroute and our 3CX PBX and would ultimately allow an IT generalist to manage our telephony - instead over having to hire VoIP engineers - like myself : ) But I just convinced my org to migrate from Cisco to 3CX - so it's not the time to suggest yet another migration AWAY from 3CX to Zoom Phone. But I'm investigating that long term for sure.

 

[SweetAction]

Recently, we lost access to our fiber connected datacenter and had no dial tone as a result. That brought on the overall discussion of migrating various services ( MS Desktop applications to O365 ) to the cloud. I've got a Zoom Phone license with 30 numbers which I'm investigating. Zoom Phone would replace both our Flowroute and our 3CX PBX and would ultimately allow an IT generalist to manage our telephony - instead over having to hire VoIP engineers - like myself : ) But I just convinced my org to migrate from Cisco to 3CX - so it's not the time to suggest yet another migration AWAY from 3CX to Zoom Phone. But I'm investigating that long term for sure.

Based on this, sounds like it being "someone else's problem" is the main appeal, with complexity being a secondary concern.

Why not go public/private cloud then? Regardless of who hosts it, an outage can happen - even with Hosted by 3CX - but you get someone else's neck to strangle.

Regarding complexity - it's going to be subjective, but I don't think for 85% of users your size (sub 100 SC) are going to need a dedicated telecom engineer on staff. Dedicated IT person, sure, but you already have that likely. So outsource the complex parts (T&M) as needed to a partner, outsource the hosting to a private/public cloud, and away you go. You could likely find one that does both (For example, we host and provide T&M support/implementation/etc for 3CX, but we are far from the only ones that do)

Or, move to Zoom, but it's likely going to be far more expensive with far less control. And while you mention cost above (don't want to pay for a contract that is the same as the license), I can't imagine it will be the cost of Zoom/anyone else. With 96SC I'm guessing ~300 extensions. That's ~$36,000/yr vs likely ~$18,000/yr.

End of the day there is probably a solution if you want one but I'll be the first to advise that no one product fits all needs/use cases. Got to do what's best for the business ultimately.

 

[N_G]

@ipt_dude Its interesting how you dont want to pay $75 for a support ticket but Zoom pricing is OK Which products give you free tech support may i ask ?

I believe an IT generalist can manage 3CX. And if a VoIP engineer is required because of your network structure for example, then it will still be required even for Zoom. Firewall and network issues will remain same as Zoom and others are all using VoIP .

But to answer your question about CFD and 3CX hosting - this requirement is going away in next few months. You will be able to run a CFD on a hosted instance. Also we will be hosting bigger instances, though you could easily use say Google Cloud right now and achieve almost the same thing right away....

But Sweetaction is right that we are placing less emphasis on CFD. Basically many things that require a CFD will be resolvable in a more easy way. That said at the same time our routing API will be extended so CFD will be able to do more things....

 

[ipt_dude]

@ipt_dude Its interesting how you dont want to pay $75 for a support ticket but Zoom pricing is OK Which products give you free tech support may i ask ?

I believe an IT generalist can manage 3CX. And if a VoIP engineer is required because of your network structure for example, then it will still be required even for Zoom. Firewall and network issues will remain same as Zoom and others are all using VoIP .

But to answer your question about CFD and 3CX hosting - this requirement is going away in next few months. You will be able to run a CFD on a hosted instance. Also we will be hosting bigger instances, though you could easily use say Google Cloud right now and achieve almost the same thing right away....

But Sweetaction is right that we are placing less emphasis on CFD. Basically many things that require a CFD will be resolvable in a more easy way. That said at the same time our routing API will be extended so CFD will be able to do more things....

I'm a big advocate of 3CX - otherwise I would not have encouraged my organization to migrate away from Cisco. I'm just not a fan of email support - 5 emails later and you have finally conveyed what can be understood in a 60 second conversation. I'd pay more per support ticket if it was phone based support. It was more the surprise of logging in and see we no longer had active forum support and no path to a 3CX hosted instance. And if there had been some type of communication - to the effect that "private cloud or on prem instances (like we are) will no longer have active forum support as of 12/31/2022" and if we had a 3CX hosted instance option - I would have made a successful argument to migrate our on-prem to a 3CX hosted instance. This last scenario would be ideal.

 

[N_G]

@ipt_dude Agreed and i appreciate you being an advocate of 3CX. I can tell you that we are ramping up our forum support team with a view to giving free guidance on the forums. When i say guidance it means for technical questions how things work we will try to help providing the user has shown to have done a bit of homework and search for previous posts and followed our guidelines. Also depends who the user is, so paying customers with decent size installs we will give priority.

When you say you have no longer active forum support then I am not sure what you mean, your account works as before for everybody. What we dont do is troubleshoot a 4 SC on premise or AWS install in the US lets say. These need to go on Startup. Its OK to host yourself and bigger orgs like this and it makes sense. But a home user we can not support on their own platform, we simply dont have the time.

In regards to support, we also offer phone support? To be honest i think $75 for a ticket is very cheap.

 

[ipt_dude]

@ipt_dude Agreed and i appreciate you being an advocate of 3CX. I can tell you that we are ramping up our forum support team with a view to giving free guidance on the forums. When i say guidance it means for technical questions how things work we will try to help providing the user has shown to have done a bit of homework and search for previous posts and followed our guidelines. Also depends who the user is, so paying customers with decent size installs we will give priority.

When you say you have no longer active forum support then I am not sure what you mean, your account works as before for everybody. What we dont do is troubleshoot a 4 SC on premise or AWS install in the US lets say. These need to go on Startup. Its OK to host yourself and bigger orgs like this and it makes sense. But a home user we can not support on their own platform, we simply dont have the time.

In regards to support, we also offer phone support? To be honest i think $75 for a ticket is very cheap.

My parents came to the US from Iran in the late 50s. They were medical professionals and but basically entrepreneurs. That was their gift to me and I admire all entrepreneurs. This is your company Nick and you've done a hell of a job building it. The last thing I ever want is someone else (from the outside) telling me how to run my business. So I'm not here to do that. I don't underestimate the challenge, for a minute, of building and profitably maintaining a global support structure. I will investigate our various support options - whether they be thru a bank of hours with a reseller or purchasing directly from 3CX. May you and the entire 3CX community continue to prosper.

 

[Evolute IT]

But to answer your question about CFD and 3CX hosting - this requirement is going away in next few months. You will be able to run a CFD on a hosted instance.

That's great! I had some customers with CFDs wanting to be hosted there.

That said at the same time our routing API will be extended so CFD will be able to do more things....

You picked my curiosity! Any examples of things you guys are planning with CFD? We use that thing constantly, so improvements are always welcomed!

 

[N_G]

@ipt_dude - Thank you for your nice words and the background, much appreciated! We do strive to make 3CX as easy to use as possible so for like IT professionals like yourself we like to ensure that it should be possible to use 3CX without too much paid assistance. Please keep comments coming on these forums and we will certainly give our guidance at no charge at all.

@ConceptsWeb its a bit early to really give many details but we are making a new call manager which will be streamlined and more API friendly shall we say. It will allow for routing scripts to do call handling.

 

[Evolute IT]

@ConceptsWeb its a bit early to really give many details but we are making a new call manager which will be streamlined and more API friendly shall we say. It will allow for routing scripts to do call handling.

1 request: checkbox for multiple Q or Ring group calls per-user! A new call manager is a good occasion to figure out why it wasn't working well before (the ALLOWUSEBUS... param)