v20 no more per-office holiday voice messages

[stijngruwier-leiedal]

after upgrading from v18 to v20 (update 0 build 1458) we noticied multiple holiday schemes can be set per department (which is great), but ont he other hand we are missing the function to link specific voice messages to holidays.

in v18 you could register/pre-record a different office holiday voice message for each holiday. something we only had to do once a year and could then forget about it.

in v20 you can only specify which days are holidays but you cannot not pre-record the individual messages for each holiday.
so now each time a holiday comes up we have to think about it to record the specific message , something that is easily forgotten ...

I hope the v18 handling of office hoidays can be brought back in v20 as it was much better than how it is now.

 

[VetDigiSolns]

Hmmm, yes I tried it and when the holiday starts, the extensions switch to out of office hours and calls then go to the normal VM destination, instead of the HOL IVR (which doesn't appear to exist anymore). Might take a bit more "playing", or another update, before it works as it should...

Or just leave 3CX. Seems they don't care.

 

[VetDigiSolns]

Why these kind of downgrading is done, I don´t understand. It seems that the developer(s) who did this, don´t use the system, and certainly do not think from the user point or from maintance point. This "reform" causes too much work. Just bring back the way it was done before.

Amen. Let us know when this will be done. In the meantime, I'm looking for another PBX to switch all my customers.

 

[VetDigiSolns]

I had the notice that all my customers on V18 would stop working unless I paid for a pro subscriptions, so I did for all my customers. I kept them all on V18. I had not vetted V20 yet, and I'm glad that I came across this info. I was simply looking for an automatic way to update the holidays so I don't need to assign staff to do it manually each year for all my customers. Instead I found out I can no longer even do that!? I can't have staff working between Christmas and New Year's to update messages for my customers' hospitals! Not only that, rather then assign projects to my team to complete for each customer, I now need my staff addressing each hospital's holiday recordings before each holiday throughout the year? I can't do that. My company will fall apart.

 

[SteveITS]

Have you tried the script above?

 

[Guillaume Bourgeois]

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3CX has have a fairly simple solution, which you can check out here:
3CX Documentation for Holiday Script

Another community member has also posted an alternative solution, available here: 3CX Community Solution

Instead of threatening to migrate your clients, why not politely ask for help? Too proud?

If your clients are reading this message, they should understand that the issue is not that 3CX removed a feature. In reality, the product is evolving to offer more flexibility. The method to achieve the same (or better) results has changed, and it remains achievable.

If you do not wish to adopt the new method, nothing prevents you from continuing to record all the holiday messages as before, upload them to the PBX, and on December 26, you can update the messages for your clients in their respective IVRs in a few minutes each, totaling about one hour of work for all your clients (You have max 25 commercials clients).
You're making threats for no reason!
You are putting yourself in an awkward situation.

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Is your business really in peril for one hour of work between Christmas and New Year’s Day? If so, your clients should change a 3CX partner, not stay with a provider on the brink of collapse, due to "2 minutes per IVR" !


Review your method of collaboration on this forum. As a partner, you have obligations, including treating your partner 3CX with respect. If you want 3CX to help you, start by being more respectful and phrase your request for help without defaming your partner.

Remember, « Keep calm and relax ! »

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If the feature makes a comeback in the web interface, that would be great, but it wouldn't be thanks to your threats! Your threats hold no value.

I'm not writing this to defend 3CX's interests; they can defend themselves just fine without me. I'm telling you this because I'm tired of seeing people like you exaggerate their situations and complain about nothing instead of simply asking for help politely!

The next step is to apologize and ask for help!

 

[Evolute IT]

To everyone having nightmares because of a holiday thing, U3 will fix that for you.

https://www.3cx.com/community/threa...ns-of-the-normal-call-flow.128509/post-611687

 

[guidoq]

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If you do not wish to adopt the new method, nothing prevents you from continuing to record all the holiday messages as before, upload them to the PBX, and on December 26, you can update the messages for your clients in their respective IVRs in a few minutes each, totaling about one hour of work for all your clients (You have max 25 commercials clients).
You're making threats for no reason!
You are putting yourself in an awkward situation.

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Is your business really in peril for one hour of work between Christmas and New Year’s Day? If so, your clients should change a 3CX partner, not stay with a provider on the brink of collapse, due to "2 minutes per IVR" !

The next step is to apologize and ask for help!

I agree the tone of the replies should be constructive and being aggressive in the discussion leads to no solution.
On the other hand in my opinion dismissing the issue as being a 2 minutes configuration change is not a good answer though.
Currently the thread in the ideas forum sits at ~200 upvotes, so this is a feature that was used and prior to U2, was missing.

And yes, it's a 2 min configuration, but let's take a real world example:
- dec. 24, office is open in the morning - holiday message in the afternoon
- dec. 25, holiday msg
- dec 26-30, normal hours
- dec 31 - office is open in the morning - holiday message in the afternoon
- jan 1 - office closed.
- jan 6 - office closed.

A lot of customers don't want (and are not used to since up to v20) to a "our office are closed for holidays" message, and while I personally don't understand why they care, they want the message to say "the office is closed from dec 24th 2pm and dec 25th, we will reopen on the 26th"

So that's 3 changes that have to be done on the fly, times the number of customers that want these types of messages. Done in holiday time where supposedly some techs are on holiday as well. In v18 this was a programmable task that any tech could do without having much knowledge of 3CX and could just follow a guide, and some customers were doing it themselves. As of now, it requires a more skilled tech to set up in advance, or it has to be done on the fly possibly outside working hours (even it's just 2 clicks per pbx it still takes time)

I like it a lot that with the new version we have more control and flexibility with call processing scripts and rest-api, but this was a functionality widely used that was there in the web ui, easy to configure and then it was not there anymore with v20.

 

[fxbastler]

And yes, it's a 2 min configuration, but let's take a real world example:

We use this (google translate is your friend). The CFD App / C# snippet can also be easily extended to include times, which we have not used yet.

Please note that European dates are used throughout (dd.mm.yyyy), but this can easily be changed.

 

[guidoq]

thanks for the input, I'll check it out and see if I can improve what we have. we already have a CFD app configured on almost all our instances to manage holidays or date/time variations.
We made a lot of them to accomodate quirky requests from customers and standardized them to apply to all instances.

My point was on the response to post #103, where, aside for the aggressive tone, I think was a legitimate issue. With v18 they have their techs that are able to schedule the holidays in advance, set tasks to do the configuration and be done with it and keep on doing their job. If they upgrade now to v20, they will have to check if they have the internal knowledge to at least understand basic coding and make sure they do since they are dealing with critical businesses (hospitals) and do some testing.
Or if they don't, do it manually every time there's a change and the previous prompt becomes obsolete.

In my little experience with pbx's I have had no issue with 3CX and have always been able to achieve what the customer asked, being it using tricks or CFD apps.
What I have said more than once here on the forums is that I wish there was an object in call handling that behaves like the Date/Time condition in the call flow design with the ability to play audio prompts and/or transfer to other call handling objects.

An object like that would cover the holidays, cover scheduled transfers to other queues/extensions on specific dates, would be able to drop all the dummy extensions used to switch routes based on time of day and in general have a cleaner flow.
The pieces are all there between the (v18) holiday panel, the forwarding rules of extensions, and the multiple date/time selections in the cfd component, if it was an object in the ui that can be added like an IVR or ring group, it would solve a lot of things that need to be done outside the ui or tricks
This is just my opinion though

 

[90lollo90]

+1

 

[wesThreecx]

Good afternoon,

We wanted to tested the holiday functionality that everyone has been discussing here. It did not go well for us, we are running Version 20.0 Update 2 (Build 715 Release)

We downloaded and modified the script referenced and added this to call processing.

Thereafter all inbound calls to the trunk were answered with a lady reporting "Cancelled".

We removed the script and no matter what else we tried the trunk would no longer work other than reporting "Cancelled".

The call log showed the incoming external call lasting for 1 second.

A VM restore fixed the problem.

 

[Evolute IT]

Good afternoon,

We wanted to tested the holiday functionality that everyone has been discussing here. It did not go well for us, we are running Version 20.0 Update 2 (Build 715 Release)

We downloaded and modified the script referenced and added this to call processing.

Thereafter all inbound calls to the trunk were answered with a lady reporting "Cancelled".

We removed the script and no matter what else we tried the trunk would no longer work other than reporting "Cancelled".

The call log showed the incoming external call lasting for 1 second.

A VM restore fixed the problem.

Why did you modify the script? It already worked. You probably have a bug in the script. You'll need to check the 3CXCallFlow log in the SupportInfo.

 

[wesThreecx]

Why did you modify the script? It already worked. You probably have a bug in the script. You'll need to check the 3CXCallFlow log in the SupportInfo.

It said to modify the script to specify the destinationDN e.g. to our Digital receptionist.....is this not right? We thought rollback would be as simple as removing the call processing script, but it was not.

 

[Evolute IT]

It said to modify the script to specify the destinationDN e.g. to our Digital receptionist.....is this not right? We thought rollback would be as simple as removing the call processing script, but it was not.

Yes it should be that simple to rollback, and ok if that's all you modified.

But clearly there's an issue somewhere else.

 

[Rogé]

I realy wonder why

To everyone having nightmares because of a holiday thing, U3 will fix that for you.

https://www.3cx.com/community/threa...ns-of-the-normal-call-flow.128509/post-611687

Are you sure? The link you are posting is not working anymore and the post in the "ideas" section fo the forum already received 225 votes but is still not even in "In concideration". Even when its in the top 5 of most popular ideas...

I cannot find anything about a "re-implementation". Slowly it gets an pain in the ass as we are "gettig forced" to update to V20.

 

[SteveITS]

link you are posting is not working

That link is to the Partner forum. What is on https://www.3cx.com/blog/releases/v20-update-3-alpha/ is: "Holiday - A script designed to handle holidays, play specific holiday prompts and manage call routing."

 

[icomms]

We migrated over to 3CX from all our Avaya systems because Avaya started charging for featues, removing features (e.g.phone manager) and also made licencing an admin nightmare. I hope 3CX does not go that way, there are a few features like this customised holiday greeting which are removed with no notice and which are leaving a bad taste in the mouth of our clients who pretty much all used this on V18. An update (in my mind) is one which keeps all existing features and adds new features, not remove them. How do I upvote this so it gets put back. Thank you.

 

[Evolute IT]

We migrated over to 3CX from all our Avaya systems because Avaya started charging for featues, removing features (e.g.phone manager) and also made licencing an admin nightmare. I hope 3CX does not go that way, there are a few features like this customised holiday greeting which are removed with no notice and which are leaving a bad taste in the mouth of our clients who pretty much all used this on V18. An update (in my mind) is one which keeps all existing features and adds new features, not remove them. How do I upvote this so it gets put back. Thank you.

It's already back. Read the blog posts.

 

[stumac]

It's already back. Read the blog posts

It's already back. Read the blog posts.

What? Where?
If you're talking about the 'script' method, then no, it is not back. The script is not a good enough solution for what was already good in v18.