Fonality is one of the premiere providers of Asterisk-based IP-PBX solutions. Fonality offers three products: PBXtra, trixbox CE (community edition), and trixbox Pro (commercial/reseller edition). trixbox Pro. which is their commercial edition runs on Fonality's "hardened" PBXtra technology, which Fonality claims has 5 thousand installations and over 325 million calls to date. trixbox Pro is a hybrid-hosted solution, which means you get 24/7 monitoring, phone mobility with no NAT traversal issues, and automatic software updates.


                                        trixbox appliance

Ratings Score Installation Documentation Features Usability Performance Overall

trixbox Pro comes in three editions. The trixbox Pro family starts with Standard Edition (SE), which is free.The remaining two editions, Enterprise Edition (EE) and Call Center Edition (CCE), are available at a low monthly cost or for a lifetime fee. TMC Labs checked out Fonality's flagship product, trixbox Pro Call Center Edition (CCE) which has all the features of trixbox Pro SE and trixbox Pro EE, plus additional call center functionality. trixbox Pro Call Center Edition scored very well in my ratings. It's lowest rating was still a very good 4 stars for 'Performance'. The reason for this not achieving 4.5 or a 5 star rating was that their hosted web interface can be occasionally slow.

trixbox Pro CCE is based on Asterisk and includes an easy web-based user interface, web-based voice mail, exportable reporting, click-to-call,  mouse-driven operator panel, Outlook integration, real-time resource graphs, system alerts, auto-card configuring, seamless VoIP trunking, and more. trixbox Pro CCE is designed for companies with 2 - 200 agents and includes ACD and IVR capabilities with unlimited queues, skills-based routing, real-time queue statistics, graphical reports, and web-based recording access.

One of the most powerful features included in trixbox Pro CCE is HUD Pro, a communications software application which features enhanced presence, on-the-fly recording, call barge, call monitor, CRM integration, and one-touch agent login. Each extension has up to 6 icons at the bottom. Depending on your permissions, you can click on one of these icons to call their voicemail, record, barge, email, call their alternate number (mobile phone), or chat.

Here's a screenshot of HUD during an internal extension call.



You'll notice there are different colors to indicate presence and color coding of calls.

Green - Inbound/outbound call
Orange - Queue call
Purple - Intraoffice extension call
Grey - Unregistered

HUD also features drag-and-drop call control, which not only lets you drag calls to someone's extension, but if that person is out of the office, you can drag the call to the mobile phone icon which will transfer the call to their mobile phone. One neat feature is that HUD can launch a Web browser to a custom URL when your extension rings. This can be used to look up inbound callers in your Web-based CRM software or even direct the search query to Google, AnyWho reverse number lookup, etc. HUD Pro also features secure chat for intraoffice instant messaging.

For users that use Outlook Contacts, there is a TAPI plugin that lets you simply right-click on a Contact and initiate a call. They have also extended TAPI so that you can call directly from your Inbox or any other Outlook email folder. What's even cooler is that trixbox Pro takes care of dialing the "9" and it automatically takes your phone off-hook (speakerphone mode) so you don't have to even touch the phone. The off-hook speakerphone mode actually works throughout HUD. So you can also double-click an internal extension from within HUD and your phone will go off-hook automatically. Similarly, you can highlight a phone number anywhere on your computer, and then "drag" that number into HUD and HUD will dial the number. I should mention that currently trixbox Pro supports this off-hook feature on Polycom and Aastra phones.

trixbox Pro has some other interesting tricks up its sleeve. For instance, it has a Firefox plugin called FONcall which automatically highlights a phone number on a web-page. You simply click it and it initiates the call - once again automatically taking your phone off-hook.

Similar to an Outlook toast popup on an incoming email, HUD also displays a toast alert in the lower right of your screen on an inbound or outbound call. This allows you to direct callers to voicemail, record, or other functions without having to open the main HUD interface. The feature-rich HUD Pro client is certainly a competitive advantage Fonality has over many other Asterisk-based solutions. Though, Fonality does offer a free version HUD Lite which has a slimmed down feature-set and which works on most Asterisk flavors. HUD Lite for instance, doesn't have on-the-fly recording, recording of others, log in & out of queues, call barging, call monitoring, and some other features. Thus, the powerful functionality in HUD Pro is a compelling reason for prospective buyers evaluating various flavors of Asterisk.

trixbox Pro supports your traditional telephony features such as auto-attendant, IVR, and voicemail. Similarly, from your desktop phone you get your traditional features such as call parking, call transfer (after a flash hook), and call conferencing. All of these work as expected. trixbox Pro also supports Ring-All (Blast Group) and similarly the ability to intercom page an extension or a group.

For trunk support, trixbox Pro supports analog, T1/E1, and now BRI. The user-friendly web-based administrator supports plug-and-play detection of your telephony hardware, which is typically Sangoma hardware in trixbox Pro. I liked the ease at which I was able to detect and configure the T1/E1 card and the two analog cards in the machine.

Faxing is also supported on trixbox Pro. While faxing on Asterisk-based platforms often gets a bad rap, (due to timing/clock syncing issues) Sangoma has recently built some very good analog hardware to solve this problem. Actually, the developed a simple bridging cable that connects from the T1/E1 card to the analog hardware to keep the timing in sync. Presto, bango! - reliable faxing on an Asterisk-based platform!

trixbox Pro has extensive BLF support, although only for Aastra phones. You can easily drag-and-drop users into your BLF area on any Aastra model with BLF support. Fonality also added automatic detection and support for the Aastra 536M and 560M sidecars to extend the number of BLF keys available on your Aastra phone.

Another key feature is the built-in conference bridges. The 5 built-in conference bridges each support an unlimited number of internal participants and as many external participants as you have inbound phone lines.

Mobility features are very strong in trixbox Pro. Each user can logon to their own personal web control panel and specify rules for how/when/where they are contacted as part of their FindMe feature (see screenshot below). FindMe supports presence detection (via HUD) to know when you have walked away from your desk and thereby ring your cell phone. Further, it features a "white list" to only allow specific people to access "findme", as well as a VIP list (spouse, important contacts) that can reach you regardless of the schedule or your HUD presence status. Very useful feature to help stay in touch with your important contacts while respecting the times you don't wish to be contacted.

Part of FindMe, the Boomerang feature allows you to send a call that has been forwarded to your cell phone right back to any extension on your PBX. Simply press some touch-tones on your cell and the call can be redirected to your assistant or back to your own desk. You can also record calls on your mobile using Boomerang - a powerful feature. Call screening is included and one of my favorite features. The caller is prompted for their name and once again you have the choice to accept or reject the call.

Telecommuters/Home workers Support
Telecommuting support in trixbox Pro is very good. trixbox Pro's hybrid-hosted approach means no more pesky VoIP over NAT firewall issues. I was able to take an Aastra phone I auto-provisioned in the office home with me, connect to my home broadband connection, and simply change the DNS setting on the phone to the external DNS entry of the trixbox server and voilà, I was able to make & receive calls to my extension. No need to poke any holes in the corporate firewall or my home firewall. Nice and simple.

Features:

• Outlook Integration
• Voicemail
• Voicemail-to-Email
• Hot Desk
• Music-on-Hold
• Scheduler
• Night Mode New!
• Custom CTI (AGI)
• Analog & IP Phones
• Call Forwarding
• Name Directory
• DIDs
• Unlimited VoIP Accounts
• PSTN Fallback
• Branch Office Support
• Web-based Control Panel
• Powerful Reporting
• Hands Free Auto Phone Provisioning
• FAX Support
• BLF Support
• BRI Detection
• E1 Support
• Live Backup Server
• Multiple Deployment Management
• Conference Bridges
• Routing by DIDs
• Paging / Zone Paging
• Intercom / Zone Intercom
• Voicemail Groups
• Advanced Call Forwarding
• Call Return
• Call Out
• Custom Caller IDs
• SMS/Pager Voicemail Notify
• Alerts & Notifications
• Trunks Status Pages
• Real-Time System Graphs
• FindMe
• Boomerang Mobile Integration
• Call Screening
• Music-On-Hold (Unlimited)
• Historical System Graphs
• Unlimited Call Queues
• Full Featured A.C.D.
• Skills-Based Routing
• Graphical Queue Reports
• Barge Report
• Agent Call Recording
• Agent Variable Log-off
• Agents on Cell Phones
• Agents Shared across Sites
• Real-Time Queue Stats

HUD features:

• Operator Panel (w/ BLF)
• Call Parking Area
• Drag & Drop Call Control
• Color-Coded Call Status
• Drag & Drop to Voicemail
• Extension Sorting
• Enterprise Instant Messaging
• Outlook Integration
• Presence Management
• Click-to-Call Mobile Phones
• Click-to-Email
• Desktop Alerts
• Interactive Desktop Alerts
• Group & User Permissions
• Extension Grouping
• Extension Search
• Extension SearchQuickMenu
• Shortcuts (Hotkeys)
• On-the-Fly Recording
• Queue Status
• Agent Login/Logout
• Call Barging (active)
• Call Monitoring (passive)
• Web Access to Recordings
• Advanced CRM Integration

Some important new features in trixbox Pro 2.0 worth highlighting:
First, calendar-based scheduling has been added allowing you to have your call menu do something specific, such as special holiday greetings. trixbox Pro has had very good auto-provisioning already, but they've improved it in 2.0. I was able to connect several Aastra and Polycom phones on our network and trixbox Pro auto-detected them and auto-assigned them an extension in sequential order. Hands free phone auto-provisioning is supported on all supported Aastra models and Polycom models with firmware 2.2 and above.

Resellers will especially like the single-screen management for all of their customers. From one Admin web interface you can switch between installations with two clicks of the mouse in the lower-right corner of the Admin Panel.

Room for Improvement:
The call recordings (screenshot of interface below) within the web-based interface should have a memo text field to allow users to add recording details, such as caller's name, topic discussed, etc. If you keep a lot of recordings, this will make it easier to reference them in the future.

I'd like to see standard-based videoconferencing support in HUD Pro. If Counterpath can offer a slick videoconferencing app (eyeBeam softphone) based on SIP and other industry standards, then surely so can Fonality. In addition to video, perhaps collaboration capabilities (WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting) would be a nice addition. This would negate the need for a separate collaboration platform, the associated licensing fees, and duplication of the same employee information which must also be maintained due to employee turnover.

One last suggestion would be to email the call recordings automatically, similar to the voicemail-to-email feature. You can of course access the recordings via the web and download & save to your local PC, but an automatic email option would be nice.

Conclusion
I was very impressed with the ease-of-use of the admin interface, and I especially liked the strong mobility features. Users will like the web-based visual voicemail and voicemail-to-email features. The web-based GUI is one of the best you'll see on any Asterisk-based platform and it makes extensive use of AJAX and tool-tips. Lastly, HUD's motley of features, including desktop call control, presence, and on-the-fly recording make trixbox Pro a compelling choice when deciding which IP-PBX to purchase.

Perhaps the only caveat with trixbox Pro as compared with other Asterisk-based solutions is the trixbox pricing. Many Asterisk-based solutions are extremely inexpensive, some under $1000. trixbox Pro does offer a relatively inexpensive monthly option. For instance, for trixbox Pro Call Center Edition (CCE) that I tested, it's $11.39/month per extension for 26-50 extensions. However, the lifetime fee is $159.99/month per extension which works out to be $14,259.50 for a 50 extension IP-PBX. That's not 'terribly' expensive, but it is more than some competing Asterisk-based solutions, though still much less expensive than many Nortel, Avaya, or Cisco systems.

I'm sure Fonality would argue their main competitors are not other Asterisk solutions but the "Big 3" (Avaya, Nortel, Cisco). Further, in my past discussions with Fonality, they've told me that they believe they add a lot of value to the "core" Asterisk that gives it a much stronger feature-set than other Asterisk-based systems. In testing trixbox Pro I would agree that it has many features I have not seen in many other Asterisk-based systems, including HUD Pro, call screening, call recording (some others do have this), strong call center functionality (queues), easy-to-use web-based admin, etc.

I recently saw a demo of Digium's latest version of Switchvox down at Digium's headquarters and did notice there are features in Switchvox that trixbox Pro doesn't have, like Web 2.0 features. I plan on doing a review on Switchvox in the near future. It'll be interesting to compare the two. Overall, I think trixbox Pro is one of the most feature-rich IP-PBXs I've reviewed and I would not hesitate to recommend it to companies looking for an easy-to-use and easy to maintain IP-PBX.

As I hinted last week, I would have some "interesting" news to tell after my visit to Digium's brand new headquarters along with colleagues Greg Galitzine and Dave Rodriguez. Before I get into the MAJOR news being made by Digium, let me cover what else I learned on my trip. It had been 3 years since I last visited Digium down in Huntville, Alabama.

After getting a grand tour of the new Digium building we sat down in a state-of-art boardroom complete with a high-end Polycom IP conferencing unit, theater lighting, and a projector with motorized retractable screen. The boardroom was named the Mark C. Smith Boardroom to honor Mark Smith, who was the founder and chief executive officer of ADTRAN and Mark Spencer's mentor. A picture honoring Mark Smith sits on a table in the room. We all admire how Mark Spencer was able to transform open source telephony - myself included - but no doubt Mark Smith and his company ADTRAN played  a major role in making Asterisk the phenomenon it is today.

During our full-day meeting, Digium wanted to fill us in on the latest happenings going on and the future directions Digium was planning to take. One of the first takeaways I took was that their 1.5 year term CEO, Danny Windham believes strongly that Asterisk should be classified as an "engine". It's the "core guts" on which other software from third-parties can be added. For instance, Asterisk is not simply an IP-PBX, as of 1.6 it has an SS7 stack enabling Asterisk to be used in carrier and service provider applications. Another example they gave was how Asterisk can run just about any protocol, and were quick to point out that sipXecs, an open source alternative recently acquired by Nortel, can't even natively run Nortel's own digital phones while Asterisk works just fine with Nortel phones.

Another important takeaway was that Digium said flat out that claims Asterisk could not scale were false or at the very least were misleading since they were based on older versions of Asterisk. In fact, it seemed Digium took great personal umbrage that some of their competitors were making these claims. As evidence of scalability, they mentioned a particular service provider running thousands of ports and are currently writing a write paper case study on this customer. When they publish it, I'll be sure to include excerpts in my blog.

One last takeaway that is important to mention is that Digium considers themselves to be the "Benevolent Asterisk Project Sponsor and Maintainer". This is a key mantra that they want to reinforce. They have no plans to ever fork Asterisk into say an open source version and a premium closed source version. They know there are many companies that do add proprietary code on top of the Asterisk engine and don't give back to the community, but Digium has no plans on monetizing Asterisk that way. I should point out that corporations that purchase Asterisk Business Edition (ABE) do have the right under the dual licensing to add their own code without giving it back to the community, however, there are companies that have taken the Asterisk engine, didn't pay for ABE, added their own code, and didn't give the code to the community.

Some interesting statistics about Digium that they told me during the meeting that I thought I'd share. First, Digium currently has 150 employees and has had 26 consecutive growth quarters. The headquarters are now running on Switchvox, which Digium acquired in September of last year. This is the first year that Digium has been named to Gartner's renowned visionaries quadrant. One stat that I've always wonder about is what percentage of Asterisk code is developed by the open source community and what percentage by Digium. Well, the answer is 50% each, which was a little surprising. I would have expected the open source community to be higher, but this goes to show you how important Digium is to the future of Asterisk. They are obviously paying for developers and making an investment in improving Asterisk.

Some other interesting stats:

• Over 1,000,000 downloads in 2007
• Project 2008 downloads at over 1.54M
• Over 4 million servers deployed with Asterisk
• Over 56,000 active on forums
• Over 17,700 on active Asterisk mailing lists
• Over 7,248 on our Bug Tracker
• Over 400 active contributors
• Over 200 service providers worldwide using Asterisk

Further, the number of commits to Asterisk Trunk was 3,498 (mainly Asterisk 1.6 related) and the number of commits to Asterisk 1.4 was 1,401 (bug fixes). A staggering 132GB of bandwidth was consumed in 2008 YTD.

Here's an interesting photo I took from the 2nd or 3rd floor aimed at the Asterisk logo which I believe is the center of the 3 buildings. From what I'm told if you fly over Digium's building, the three buildings form the Asterisk logo. For some reason looking down at this circular area reminded me of the Star Trek Enterprise's warp core. Forget "Powered by Intel", this building is "Powered by Asterisk".


Digium recently hired Stephen Burcham, the Director of Quality who came from a company that designed controllers for anti-lock braking systems, which demand the most stringent quality control and reliability standards. Stephen has brought that same high standards mentality to Digium. Surprisingly, Digium's hardware production is done by two American companies, so it's Made in the U.S.A. Considering many electronics can be done more cheaply in China, I was happy to hear Digium was using American companies to manufacture their goods. In fact, Digium is using two local Alabama companies and they told me that they actually made in an investment in at least one of them to purchase a higher-end process manufacturing machine to meet Digium's stringent quality requirements.

One of the biggest challenges facing Digium has less to do with technology and more to do with market perception. Digium told us that they have to battle Cisco and their claims that Asterisk is not a business class solution. I found it fascinating that Cisco is still able to leverage their own name brand recognition to get (scare?) customer wins, but if anything that's great news for Digium and Asterisk. It isn't technical comparisons or feature-sets that Asterisk is losing customers to Cisco, it's name brand recognition. That'll improve with time and my guess is very quickly since Asterisk has a full head of steam.

Now for the interesting news. AsteriskNOW which previously ran on rPath will now be using the very popular CentOS (5.2) distribution. Now that it runs on CentOS it will support easy operating system updates (via .rpm files). Also new in AsteriskNOW will be a yum repository for easy updates of Asterisk itself. Just 'yum' the lastest version of Asterisk and it will upgrade your version of Asterisk without screwing up your customizations.

Also new is that the next release of AsteriskNOW (1.5) will bundle the very popular FreePBX front-end GUI. This is big news! FreePBX has become the defacto standard for web-based GUI administration of Asterisk, so now Asterisk fans can download AsteriskNOW, boot of the self-install CD and not only getting a working copy of AsteriskNOW, but FreePBX as well! This isn't to say Digium will stop developing their own GUI. In fact, when I asked that question, they said categorically they will continue to develop and improve their Asterisk GUI 2.0, which is currently installed on Asterisk Business Edition (ABE) and the Digium Asterisk Appliance 50 (AA50), as part of the 1.2 release I recently blogged about. Digium told me they expect the next release of AsteriskNOW to be available by Astricon.

Some other interesting news to talk about soon and I want to blog my grand tour of Digium's state-of-the-art facility, but I'll break that out into a separate blog post. Stay tuned...

So today I get a new report from the Tolly Group stating that the ShoreTel Unified Communications system is significantly more energy efficient than the Cisco Unified Communications Manager. ShoreTel apparently topped Cisco in using less energy to drive VoIP communications in specific large, medium and small enterprise-class scenarios.

This energy usage comparison reminded me of Nortel's "The 'Nortel' Tax Relief Plan", which aims to "stop paying the 'Cisco Energy Tax' and save up to 40%". Tony Rybczynski who works for Nortel and writes a TMCNet blog called The HyperConnected Enterprise sparked some controversy with some of his blog posts promoting the fact that Nortel is more efficient than Cisco. He even cites one customer that put a stop order on a $2 million dollar Cisco order once they did the energy efficiency calculations.

Is that what it's come down to? Instead of feature-to-feature comparisons where going to have to start comparing energy consumption? I'm not against the idea, I just find it kind of humorous that everyone is jumping on the enviro-green bandwagon.

I have to wonder if an IT manager, CTO, etc. might purchase a more efficient IP-PBX over a less efficient one that has many more features? Well, certainly in San Francisco and other uber-green areas that might be the case. Green trumps everything when you're a greenie - not that there's anything wrong with that.

I should point out that the IT Manager or CTO often not held accountable to what the electricity costs are. Many businesses see their electricity bills just as one of the costs of running their businesses. Other than instructing their users to turn off their radios, monitors, and computers at night, most businesses don't delve into purchasing energy efficient computer or phone equipment. That is changing due to high energy costs - albeit slowly.

What's missing from this ShoreTel energy comparison report is a comparison with Nortel, Avaya, and other IP-PBX players. Just who is the "king" of energy efficiency? Inquiring minds want to know.

So what are your thoughts on the IP-PBX Energy Wars? Do you care about efficiency or are features for important to you? Post a comment.

Lastly, the press release is included after the jump for your perusal...