V16 Update 8A - BETA - Restore Old Extension

[N_G]

With v18 update 2 we updated the Chrome and Edge Extension to work optimally for v18. To reiterate: Apps and Extensions are always for the latest version of 3CX. However, this means that v16 users no longer have access to the extension with the integrated dial pad. If you do not want or cannot move to v18 now, this update allows you to use the old ...

Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

[accentlogic]

@Nick Galea I am sure this will be much appreciated! It's good to see 3CX move so quickly on feedback.

One of the things I like most about 3CX is your agility and the constant improvement. But agility and constant improvement are also one of the things I like least - it's a two edged sword that cuts both ways.

As 3CX moves into larger enterprise environments, change management becomes even more important. Some of our clients, such as large retail operations, do not allow changes during the last 45 days of the year. Others require months for approval, testing, training and rollout.

Hopefully, 3CX can continue to add features and give partners and clients at least six months notice of any feature or functionality that will go away.

 

[alainarnold]

Hi



Thank you for the quick update.

But the old extension doesn’t seems to work with v18 update 2. But it should work, right? We got a lot of mac users that’s why it is important for us.

For Windows users, the new client is the right decision.

 

[NickD_3CX]

Hi



Thank you for the quick update.

But the old extension doesn’t seems to work with v18 update 2. But it should work, right? We got a lot of mac users that’s why it is important for us.

For Windows users, the new client is the right decision.

For V18 U2 questions, I would suggest posting in the other thread from now on that is for that update:
https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/update-2-final-search-across-contacts-and-team-members.86335/

This thread is for the V16 U8a update.

To answer your question though, for V18 U2 system and non-Windows users, follow these intructions:
https://www.3cx.com/community/threa...s-contacts-and-team-members.86335/post-407386

 

[Sven Witlox]

@Nick Galea I am sure this will be much appreciated! It's good to see 3CX move so quickly on feedback.

One of the things I like most about 3CX is your agility and the constant improvement. But agility and constant improvement are also one of the things I like least - it's a two edged sword that cuts both ways.

As 3CX moves into larger enterprise environments, change management becomes even more important. Some of our clients, such as large retail operations, do not allow changes during the last 45 days of the year. Others require months for approval, testing, training and rollout.

Hopefully, 3CX can continue to add features and give partners and clients at least six months notice of any feature or functionality that will go away.

This is the most sensible thing i've read all day about this "incident". How can you excpect partners with 100+ cliënts and systems with over 1200 users to update within a timerange of 2 months....and to be honest we never update to a new version quick because of all the bugs and fixes.

No not all of them are using the browser extension but I can tell you i've had some unpleasent calls today with some customers....

 

[NeilSmith_UBT]

Thanks Nick

Your company's fast response to this issue is very much appreciated. we are about 40-50% through upgrading our systems to V18, this saves us having to rush through the rest of them and we can complete the program in a more structured manner.

 

[luckystrikes]

Much appreicated, we updated what we could to v18 last night, had a bunch of crashes that need to be resolved. Waiting patiently for the mac app continues!

 

[cmp1]

This is the most sensible thing i've read all day about this "incident". How can you excpect partners with 100+ cliënts and systems with over 1200 users to update within a timerange of 2 months....and to be honest we never update to a new version quick because of all the bugs and fixes.

No not all of them are using the browser extension but I can tell you i've had some unpleasent calls today with some customers....

Agreed. We have a change freeze during middle of October through beginning of December for operational season, and after due to holidays and limited staffing. Really, after October 1, we're more or less on a change freeze until Jan 1.

We were hoping to move to v18 before our freeze, but were waiting for U1 to move to GA, missed that, and glad to not have users experience the change from PEOPLE -> TEAM -> PEOPLE along with all the other changes.

 

[N_G]

Thank you for the feedback. In general i feel it should be a faster process to upgrade to a new version. Its not been 2 months, its been 6 months, and after a 6 long month beta process, so it was a very stable version.

That it takes time to update the clients i understand. But by staying on v16 on re-installing the extension you now have to go and do it two times. Once now, once in a few months.

If the upgrading of the servers takes so much time then please consider using our hosted edition (which we give to partners at the pure hosting cost)

 

[Sven Witlox]

Thank you for the feedback. In general i feel it should be a faster process to upgrade to a new version. Its not been 2 months, its been 6 months, and after a 6 long month beta process, so it was a very stable version.

That it takes time to update the clients i understand. But by staying on v16 on re-installing the extension you now have to go and do it two times. Once now, once in a few months.

If the upgrading of the servers takes so much time then please consider using our hosted edition (which we give to partners at the pure hosting cost)

Thanks for your reply Nick, i'm not going to argue about release dates. But the final v18 was released mid August, i'm going on that date. We are in the last weeks of the year and with COVID and remote workers it is hard to inform and train users on short notice (like stated earlier, some customers do not allow any changes or updates in the last weeks of the year). So we planned the bigger sites in januari, not because it's difficult to upgrade but we're dealing with customers here and it's their telecom system. Some customers deceide when they roll-out an update, not us.

 

[MH_INDUS]

@Nick Galea, 3CX v18 for Windows was available on 13th October. That is less than 2 months ago.

 

[rob.jeffrey]

We don't have the option to install the V16 Beta update, it's simply not there. V18 update or nothing and we can't do that yet. How can we access the Version 16 beta update?

 

[NickD_3CX]

We don't have the option to install the V16 Beta update, it's simply not there. V18 update or nothing and we can't do that yet. How can we access the Version 16 beta update?

Try rebooting your 3CX Server, then check again.
If you V16 is installed on Debian, remember that you can reboot it from the Management Console --> Dashboard --> Terminal, and here type "reboot" and press enter.

 

[rob.jeffrey]

Try rebooting your 3CX Server, then check again.
If you V16 is installed on Debian, remember that you can reboot it from the Management Console --> Dashboard --> Terminal, and here type "reboot" and press enter.

Restart worked, thanks

 

[roadmapit]

You will get no praise from us on this fix. This is the least really that should have been done in our and our clients opinions. We have had a lot of angry calls over the last 24 hours.

We feel this has been really poorly communicated.

As a lot of our customers are Mac based, it seems that you have neglected them with these changes. Breaking the Chrome extension when they have no other viable option application option.

Disappointed in how this has been handled and the burden that has been placed on our teams. It surely would of made more sense to communicate this better and delay the update until a Mac application was available.

 

[mrb280]

I have to agree with @roadmapit and @MH_INDUS. V18 for Windows was not released anywhere close to 6 months ago. And this change was very poorly communicated. Voice is a mission critical operation for our organization. Upgrading the day a major update is released is not how we handle our operation. Cloud hosting is not an option for us as we need to have redundancy and having our instance on prem gives us that ability to fully control and manage redundancy of both the PBX, our trunks and our trunk providers.

The only communication received regarding deprecation of V16 was around the licensing services no longer functioning after November 2022. We have over 1500 users, many working remotely using the web client due to the pandemic. To make this change with no communication to customers was absolutely inexcusible and this fix is the very least of what should have been done. In fact, it should have been done prior to updating the extension with Google.

I hope 3CX treats their partners and customers with more respect than this in the future. If the statistics on your homepage are correct with over 600,000+ customers and 12 million users, you need to realize you're not a small operation affecting only your own employees. That's how your support acts when speaking to customers. If you want us to continue to use and promote your product in public, at least give us the courtsey of communications when there's a major functional change to a product that's in production.

 

[N_G]

In retrospect we should have left a week between the update and the upload of the extension and reiterated the deadline in a blog post and a follow up email. I agree.

On the other hand our dedicated forum team and myself have made every effort to explain to as many people as possible what the options are and given the correct path forward. Both in blog posts a few days as well as a few months ago and in comments to countless forum posters.

The Extension
-------------------
The extension is an auxiliary app, it is not required to make or receive calls. So it's nowhere near "breaking" the system. It is going away for everybody in the next 3-6 months (we don't know which Chrome update exactly might break it but the API will definitely be removed in 6 months. The June deadline has been communicated only very recently - previously it was not announced and we thought it would be much sooner)

Now 95% of the users of the extension are on Windows (we know for a fact - the Chrome store tells us). Whether on v16 or v18, Windows users have a perfectly good and long term solution in the bundled Windows app. Re-installing the extension for 3 months for your users on Windows does not make sense at all.

Mac users - making up less than 5% of extension users (fact)- can get the old extension back in minutes if on v18. That is whilst we ready the Mac app in the coming month (we have announced many times). Linux desktop users - the number is negligible, not even 0.1% (fact - ironically including myself and our team) can also get the extension back in minutes. Plus the inbuilt v18 web app without the extension works much better on Linux then the v16 one because OS notifications with answer / reject are now supported. I am using the web client - no extension - together with OS notification myself and it's perfectly adequate. Probably even for most windows and mac users.

Upgrade Cycles
---------------------
V18 has been out since August (yes Windows October, but Windows users get update 1 so it does not push back release date) and it is the most stable 3CX version ever. The mobile experience is significantly better. I don't think it matters whether it's 6 months or a year. We are 100% confident in V18 and that it is much better than v16. The upgrade path is tried and tested and more then half of our customers are now on v18 (hence updating the extension to work with v18) We actively support users moving to v18 and for those unable to, we have free hosted and upgrade options. So our recommended path of action was and remains absolutely correct.

I think if communications are mission critical, partners and admins must prepare to have shorter upgrade cycles. The IT world is changing fast. Hackers are becoming smarter and more vicious and are not going to wait for a year until you upgrade. Browser, Mobile OS and OS updates are happening on a weekly basis and much more often compared to say 3 years ago. We understand that some admins and partners might not be able to deal with this so we provided our hosting free in the first year and at cost in subsequent years.

 

[Dan JEM]

Updating due to security issue (Log4j) and updating just because it's a shiny new version are two completely different things and yet you are lumping them together. Yes there are probably security fixes in every new build but major versions still generally get treated as staged rollout versus lets just go gun ho and hope for the best and that there are no issues. I still remember a 15.5 update that borked DNS resolution for SIP carriers. Imagine if we just pushed hard right when that came out the mess we would have had on our hands.

Also, should we just start forcing all of our customers to Server 2022 and Windows 11 without giving Microsoft a few months of patches and other vendors to catch up (IE backup)? Swift and agile can be good, but it can also become a big wrecking ball.

And not everyone has the option of being in the cloud either, and that still introduces someone else maintaining and pushing the updates whenever before users might be ready for a change.

 

[Jeremy Nelson]

"Whether on v16 or v18, Windows users have a perfectly good and long term solution in the bundled Windows app."

Does the new Windows app work with v16? I was under the impression that it didn't (since it's not downloadable by users in their web client interface). We would have started rolling that out long before this and avoid having to change everything at once.

 

[Evolute IT]

Does the new Windows app work with v16? I was under the impression that it didn't (since it's not downloadable by users in their web client interface). We would have started rolling that out long before this and avoid having to change everything at once.

No it is not. It only works with v18.