Exploring VitalPBX
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@syko24 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller is there any kind of endpoint manager?
Found the answer, yes it does have an endpoint manager.
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Hm. Can't seem to get nginx working with it for web access to demo. Ports 80/443 are open and it's still 502'ing.
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@fuznutz04 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller Any reason why you're changing from FreePBX? Is it because of all the recent changes at Sangoma? Or just want to try something new?
He always plays with the newest toys, if for no other reason than to learn them.
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@Dashrender said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@fuznutz04 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller Any reason why you're changing from FreePBX? Is it because of all the recent changes at Sangoma? Or just want to try something new?
He always plays with the newest toys, if for no other reason than to learn them.
Same for me. I would never roll something like this into productoin at a cleint anytime soon. I need to learn it first.. But me learning it first would be me posting shit here like @scottalanmiller is.
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@fuznutz04 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller Any reason why you're changing from FreePBX? Is it because of all the recent changes at Sangoma? Or just want to try something new?
Learning for one. Not really concerned with the changes at Sangoma, Sangoma is a fine company from my experiences with them and the people that they are losing weren't a team I'm very concerned about. Any risks from Sangoma would be to Asterisk and that would impact VitalPBX, Wazo, and others, as well.
This was kind of "just the right" combination of discussions a few weeks ago where we had some phone people talk to us about VitalPBX and then the discussion with the FreePBX founder a few days ago really put it into my head. We've always known that the FreePBX layer on top of Asterisk was super amateur and kludgy, but it was the natural progression from TrixBox and Elastix over the years and, at the time, was far and away where we would want to have been. But they really were good almost entirely because they were the only game in town, not because it was "good" by any absolute standard. The PBX distro was a collection of other packages that are all solid and great, but the FreePBX layer on top was pretty rough; but we could ignore that as it is just the administration interface for the most part. So we never worried about it and test other products from time to time and there are some good ones, but nothing has been so dramatic to make us really want to evaluate for switching.
VitalPBX is a bit unique in that they basically took an identical approach that FreePBX did - same overall component selection, approach, design, etc. But its built by professional developers who know what they are doing it would seem. The design is cohesive, responsive (both in the web terminology and the IT one), competent, etc. Unlike Wazo which requires relearning and thinking differently about your PBX, VitalPBX is a "drop in replacement" for FreePBX. Since FreePBX does exactly what we want, VitalPBX seems to do exactly what we want - but does it well (so far.)
So VitalPBX is a different situation than everything we've seen before. It's got a long standing (if small) company behind it. It's exactly the product we wished that we would have had for all these years. It fits our internal and customer use profiles perfectly. And it requires essentially no retraining so our engineers using FreePBX can just look at VitalPBX and run with it. I was literally more effective on VitalPBX in like ten minutes just because it's so intuitive and the platform moves that much faster
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@syko24 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller is there any kind of endpoint manager?
Sure does. All included, no "paid for" add on.
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@Emad-R said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Centos Latest 7 ? like what version are you running
Totally up to date.
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@Emad-R said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Centos Latest 7 ? like what version are you running , i tend to use rolling ISO:
1902-01.iso
https://buildlogs.centos.org/rolling/7/isos/x86_64/?C=M;O=DAlso what is the Asterisk Version ?
16.3.0 - you can see it in the first screen shot in the bottom right.
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@fuznutz04 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller I've just started testing with FusionPBX as well. Totally different animal, since the backend is FreeSwitch, but it is very nice so far.
FusionPBX should be ideal if you want to host multi-tenant. That's its bread and butter and easily is the best for that. VitalPBX will do multi-tenant but requires a commercial component for that and its simply not the core use case (and not one we are interested in, so we don't care.) We are a one tenant operator today whether internally or for customers. So while we find that use case very interesting and important, it just doesn't come up for us (yet.)
We need a really solid "go to" single tenant system. And so far, this is the best I've put my hands on.
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@wirestyle22 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
Hm. Can't seem to get nginx working with it for web access to demo. Ports 80/443 are open and it's still 502'ing.
Check the IDS.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@syko24 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller is there any kind of endpoint manager?
Sure does. All included, no "paid for" add on.
This concerns me. Keeping an EPM solution accurate and up to date for even a single brand of phones is a large amount of work.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
FusionPBX should be ideal if you want to host multi-tenant.
That is also one of the reason that FreeSwitch forked from Asterisk years ago. To better handle multi-tenancy.
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@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@syko24 said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller is there any kind of endpoint manager?
Sure does. All included, no "paid for" add on.
This concerns me. Keeping an EPM solution accurate and up to date for even a single brand of phones is a large amount of work.
It's a valid concern.
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So lots to be thrilled about. One staggering caveat is that while it is free, VitalPBX is not open source. This is a really huge deal and something that has to be considered if you are thinking about it for production.
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@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
So lots to be thrilled about. One staggering caveat is that while it is free, VitalPBX is not open source. This is a really huge deal and something that has to be considered if you are thinking about it for production.
That is not a deal breaker, but it lowers this on my priority list.
One thing about FreePBX is that most of it is OpenSource. I don't mind some proprietary stuff that I can buy/add to make life easier, but I like that it is mostly open.
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@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@scottalanmiller said in Exploring VitalPBX:
So lots to be thrilled about. One staggering caveat is that while it is free, VitalPBX is not open source. This is a really huge deal and something that has to be considered if you are thinking about it for production.
That is not a deal breaker, but it lowers this on my priority list.
One thing about FreePBX is that most of it is OpenSource. I don't mind some proprietary stuff that I can buy/add to make life easier, but I like that it is mostly open.
Yeah. Not a deal breaker for me either, because of how PBXs work there really is no way to lock us in. So I'm not worried about it. But it does mean, for example, I can't just jump in and help to develop the Endpoint Manager for models that they don't already support. Something that seemed like a realistic thing otherwise.
But on the plus side, basically all of the features I would want are built in and free. Unlike FreePBX where there are often one or two that seem like should be purchased.
One things that we normally buy with FreePBX from a third party is FOP2. VitalPBX has their own option for this, that is cheap and the only add on that looked really compelling.
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We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.
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@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:
We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.
Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.
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@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:
We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.
Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.
We calculate it per capita to account for the imbalance. We don't have a ton of VitalPBXs on our network, but enough to have an opinion. Its not hard science, hence the "grain of salt," but we do keep up with what systems work better than others. (Its a big part of how our relationship pricing works)
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@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@JaredBusch said in Exploring VitalPBX:
@Skyetel said in Exploring VitalPBX:
We're very fond of VitalPBX. Take this with a grain of salt - but VitalPBX generates a very low number of support requests when compared to other PBXs. We tend to view that as a good indicator of how well the system works and how easy it is to administer.
Grain of salt indeed. How are you calculating that? This is a solution with a tiny fraction of the current market. Low number of requests are easily just because there are fewer people installing it. Also because it is typically the more technical people trialing things, they also need less help.
We calculate it per capita to account for the imbalance. We don't have a ton of VitalPBXs on our network, but enough to have an opinion. Its not hard science, hence the "grain of salt," but we do keep up with what systems work better than others. (Its a big part of how our relationship pricing works)
I should add - VitalPBX might surprise you with how popular it is. It's also growing really really fast. Vital is definitely well beyond a "tiny fraction." They're just not a major player... yet.
