What’s Cooking in our Remote Kitchens? The 3CX Road Map

[michelescapini]

@Polaris15 - all those APIs are web based..... If you have a specific functionality for an API in mind let me know or put it in the feature requests? I believe we cover 95% of the integration cases.

@michelescapini - as mentioned in the blog post we can never give exact dates. We just released the beta.

ok, thanks, in the blog i've read "Update 5 should be released by the end of the month and it’s important to update as soon as possible this time" is the month of March or April intended?

 

[N_G]

@michelescapini sorry about confusion. Update 5 much sooner than that... yesterday beta we need to wait at least a week. From release date of update 5 we then need to wait a month at least before we can update the iOS app, thats what i meant...

 

[Richard Turner]

"We will be updating the reporting module to address outstanding issues."

Does this mean bug fixes or making reporting better so we don't have to go to VoIP tools etc - personally I'd like time-to-answer values and decent standalone wallboards.

WebMeetings - it's a fantastic feature but it is still struggling. Excited about the self-hosted MCU. Currently, other VC offerings such as Google Meetups seem to degrade better and not cut out. Remember at the moment, many users are forced to use home broadband, so adding infrastructure in the cloud might not help as much as more adaptive video. Users want it to work, not have to fiddle with settings.

 

[Kai Alexander Fischer]

My personal wishlist:

- Recurring meetings (currently we’re doing this by setting the meetings start date way far in the future)
- An Api Endpoint to create webmeetings. This would allow us to develop a slash command app for RocketChat/Slack/Teams

 

[cortel]

So excited for these changes. Would also love to see some love in the Queue department. Sitll needs to be a way to keep the queue open if agents go away, or at least a way to manually extend wrap up time so agents don't have to go unavailable to finish work.

 

[Paul@ISO]

A big dream has been to be able to sync 3CX call status with Microsoft Teams status i.e. A user is on a call in 3CX their Teams presence turns to DND or Busy, and when they're in a Teams meeting their 3CX phone goes to DND or Away. This should be very easy since both products have great APIs.

Due to problems with this our company has been considering moving over from 3CX to Direct Routing through MS Teams. I'd really like to stick with 3CX for calls!

 

[N_G]

@Richard Turner - Yes also improvements to reports. Feel free to PM me screenshots or examples of reports that you feel are missing. Thanks for the feedback on webmeeting, will reply in more detail about this later today....

@Kai Alexander Fischer . API to create a webmeeting is a very good point. Recurring meetings is coming....

@cortel Thanks for the feedback. I didnt get the point re the queue, you mean to avoid users having to login or logout?

@Paul@ISO Makes sense..... Something for us to look at.....

 

[surenr]

@Nick Galea , this week tried 3cx web meeting and it failed, i gave my click2meet link and each user was own there own session we couldnt connect together at all. this things only make ppl go to zoom,

 

[LeonidasG_3CX]

@Nick Galea , this week tried 3cx web meeting and it failed, i gave my click2meet link and each user was own there own session we couldnt connect together at all. this things only make ppl go to zoom,

WebMeeting works out of the box without any extra configuration. The reason why all users go to a different meeting in your case is because possibly yourself or your PBX admin have configured your extension's click2meet settings to do exactly that.

These are the defaults 3CX uses. Go to Extension > Click2Meet and set it as follows and it will work.


These and more are all specified in our user manual here:
https://www.3cx.com/user-manual/video-conferencing/

To be fair, i understand how this may be confusing. The wording in the Click2Meet settings are something we'll make more clear in an upcoming PBX update.

 

[pcwizarduk]

Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

Any news on Raspberry PI4 and SBC

 

[Richard Turner]

@Richard Turner - Yes also improvements to reports. Feel free to PM me screenshots or examples of reports that you feel are missing. Thanks for the feedback on webmeeting, will reply in more detail about this later today....

Thanks Nick. Should say that watching status.3cx.net, you guys are obviously working very hard on the webmeeting systems. It is appreciated.

As for reporting - we've pulled a lot from the CDR output but calculating TimeToAnswer for an end phone, not a ring group or queue is really hard. Knowing how long it took from the first ring to human pickup would be very useful. Having that in a built-in report more so. Customers want to know how long it took to get to an agent - there could be commercial penalties associated with slow answering!

In the idea world - a report designer (or a Reporting API) able to pull in call data so we can get the system to send branded reports to customers automatically!

I think standalone wallboards are mentioned regularly, but +1 again for that.

 

[Saqqara]

Any news on Raspberry PI4 and SBC

Currently scheduled for update 6

 

[ww@imp]

somethng link an outlook plugin is required, so that meetings can be managed from outlook and not the 3CX client only. Users plan their day in their calendar. it is about usability on managing meetings.

 

[cortel]

@Nick Galea We do a lot of call queueing for medical practices. The agents cannot have a set wrap up time as each call has unique circumstances. One call may be a quick wrap up but the next call they may have to call An MA or a hospital or even a pharmacy. So lets say the queue only has 3 agents working and by chance they all have to do wrap up that takes longer than 30 Sec( i know this is adjustable), The only way currently for the agent to bypass the wrap up is to change their status to away which logs them out of the Queue, then the queue shuts down as there are no agents available and create a serious problem. What all other ACD programs have is either a way to end wrap up early and then set the wrap up to a long time out, or a button to extend the wrap up time. The Best solution though that i have seen in all other major queue features is an option on what to do with the calls if no agents in queue, ie. keeps the calls in the queue and not shut down, or a way for the agent to stay logged in to the queue but go unavailable so they could do what they need but not log them out and close the queue.

 

[surenr]

WebMeeting works out of the box without any extra configuration. The reason why all users go to a different meeting in your case is because possibly yourself or your PBX admin have configured your extension's click2meet settings to do exactly that.

These are the defaults 3CX uses. Go to Extension > Click2Meet and set it as follows and it will work.
View attachment 15283

These and more are all specified in our user manual here:
https://www.3cx.com/user-manual/video-conferencing/

To be fair, i understand how this may be confusing. The wording in the Click2Meet settings are something we'll make more clear in an upcoming PBX update.

i selected the first option only "notify me ...."

above doesnt make sense at all. all connected using my click2meet link only, how could they go to separate sessions ?, in each ones screen only there name was there.

 

[weimerd]

I could add:

zoom provides highlighting the current speaker, making it easy to prevent people talking at the same time

zoom takes much less ressourcesfrom client machine during video conference. I can do video conference with 12 people without issueson client machine.

With 3CX Webmeeting the client machine gets heavily under pressure. With 12 people it does not really work anymore. video is stuckering, quality is poor. And that's not realted to the internet connection whcih had plenty of capacity left here.

I'm planning to heavily advertise the 3CX especially because of the webmeeting option in next days. Would be great if we could get a sign that webmeeting gets some changes under the hood to increase performance on local machines. And if the feature "active speaker gets highlighted" is added it would be just perfect

Thanks for all your hard work on developing 3CX.If you take the chances of time now 3CX will have BIG success. We are nearly bombed daily with requests of a working alternative for zoom (gdpr is a point here and nobody trusts zoom here too much)

 

[noord]

@Nick Galea
Regarding the Zoom/Webmeeting discussion.
I really like Webmeeting and have used it without issues many times.
However, many times there are issues and it’s really unclear why.

Most frequent issue is some people not being able to hear everyone. And this is really inexplicable.
I have (for example) 8 users and everyone can hear everony, except for person 3 who cannot hear person 6. No matter how many times person 3 or 6 leave and rejoin, it always ends up person 3 not hearing person 6. That’s rally odd.
Same happens when dialling via an normal landline: all people can hear the caller (let’s name him Jim) and Jim can hear everyone, except for person 5 who cannot hear Jim. I really cannot understand how this can happen technically, but it does.
This also happens in demo’s and that’s not good.

Other thing people dislike is the blinking and reordering of webcam streams every time someone mutes their microphone. If a mic is (un)muted, the screen of that person turns black for 1-2 seconds and often also cause people to change places. Same happens when someone disconnects for a minute because of poor wifi or something, then immediately all webcam streams get re-ordered (better have a static image ‘reserve’ someone’s place for a few minutes if they lewithout properly clicking ‘leave meeting’)

These are the main two issue I have experienced with clients and in demo’s and it causes them to switch to something else.
If anything could be done about this - I also noticed another partner mentioning the audio issues on the first page of this topic...

other than this, Webmeeting is really easy to use and has a nice featureset. Sure, there can always be more features but stability is the most important.

 

[luckystrikes]

@nick just to build on your post - not only is Zoom selling your data to FB there has always been issues related to security. MY guess is they sacrifice security for speed as MUCH as possible. Let's not forget when they turned our computers into mini open servers.

https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-...look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/

https://webrtchacks.com/zoom-avoids-using-webrtc/

https://blog.syscall.party/post/tampering-with-zooms-anti-tampering-library/

@polaris please discuss with a partner your needs. A lot of people go at it alone compared to being promised the world by the sales guy of the competitor. Not only will you spend way more money with the other brands, you probably won't get what you want anyway. A real call center PBX, even a 3CX based one, requires tons of time to customize, develop and maintain. There are even 3CX partners that have built special tools around call center, some that excel at CFD and more. If you want a call center PBX out of a retail box, it's like trying to get the hot-pink pickup truck @ the dealership and being upset they only have the grey one available

edit: typo

 

[N_G]

@luckystrikes thank you again for the heads up! just so you know we are discussing your analysis internally with our product management team. Based on this months experience, user feedback and your analysis we are going to make quite a few changes for the better to be rolled out in the coming days and more over the coming months.

@weimerd - thanks for feedback, yes we will keep this in mind

@noord - this is unfortunate we will PM for more details if possible

Apologies if we have not responded to all points or all posts, note we do take note of what has been pointed out. We are in the process of actioning numerous improvements over the coming month.

 

[accentlogic]

@luckystrikes thank you for taking the time to put together everything you did here and @Nick Galea for taking into considering some of the great ideas in this thread. A couple more I'd like to add:

• Make join by phone instructions "clickable", where the conference number is followed by a couple of commas for delay, the conference ID, and then #.
• Configure all 3CX soft phones to accept commas as a two second delay so that a click will join the conference call and pass the # symbol.
• A separate link for users to join Web Meetings a "video only" link that does not include audio for users who are dialing in
• The option for each user to choose between computer/phone audio. (The "video only" link would at least be a good short term solution.)
• Make Android/iOS links join the meeting if the app is already installed. (Currently says meeting ended if users click this after install.)