Switching up Switchvox

Last week I worked with a new client who was upgrading Switchvox SMB 3 to 4.5, and it was a great reminder of how far Switchvox has come in a relatively short time. It was also a chance to get my hands on some of the new features in the field and find out how much easier they can make my life. For those who don't remember or aren't familiar, Switchvox is Digium's first unified communications appliance based on the Asterisk source with an easy web GUI to manage everything.

The client is a small (<20) engineering firm focused on fuel cell development, which is frankly pretty cool. They had worked with another reseller to put in the original Switchvox system, so this was the first time we had met. I got a chance to walk around their offices and design floor and see some of the stuff that they're working on, and then we got down to phone business.

One of the big problems they were having was that the phones were originally set up manually rather than through the automatic provisioning system in Switchvox. Some of the settings were odd, firmware hadn't been updated since day one, and managing the phones was a pain. Now, to be perfectly honest, I've had my tussles with the Switchvox provisioning system in the past, so I sort of understood why someone might choose the manual route. On the other hand, you lose a lot of nice functionality when you go off on your own to provision the phones and it's a lot more work to maintain over time. At any rate, after some false starts due to a malfunctioning switch, I began the provisioning process.

Digium did a lot of revamps of provisioning for this release and the results are NICE. I got all the phones set up and assigned to extensions within a few minutes sitting at a single desk; no running around having to reboot phones manually, which sometimes happened in the old release. No weirdness with the phones holding old settings and not coming over cleanly. Each phone was accessible, configurable, and rebootable from the web GUI. On top of that, Switchvox now has the ability to provision multiple lines on auto-provisioned phones, which lets you set up either different system extensions on one phone OR setup a line to go to a totally different server. At the client site, I set up a phone to ring and make outbound calls for two different extensions, with different outbound caller ids. When I got back to our office, I did a test and found that I could very easily set up a phone to ring on a totally separate SIP-compliant PBX. Even better, you can set up an alternate host for both the main extension and the additional lines so, if something happens to the main PBX, the phone will try to go to a backup system rather than just shutting everyone down. This is a great feature for business continuity and really brings the Switchvox provisioning system up to speed on resilient, enterprise features.

Although I have yet to play around with all of them, Digium also added a slew of new features for provisioned phones. Most of them are available for any provisioned phone, although a couple of them are only for the Polycoms. One of them, which sounds like a minor feature until you've been driven crazy by not having it, is to turn off missed call notifications. Particularly when you're a member of a queue, these can get excessive and they're often confusing for users — the call was answered by someone else, but it still shows as a missed call on my phone; this is actually a very smart feature to have and I was kind of impressed that Digium was paying enough attention to realize the need for it. One other feature that people have really been asking for is the distinctive ring. Actually, I originally thought this one was kind of frou-frou (sorry, guys!) until several clients pointed out the various reasons they needed it: for those with door intercoms, it help distinguish calls from the intercom; people with multiple lines can tell them apart; you can use it to differentiate between internal calls, external calls, and queue calls; you can use it ring one way for your boss and another way for your spouse so you never accidentally call your boss 'honey'. OK, OK, I got it — this is a major feature upgrade that people are excited to use. Heck, after talking to everybody about it, now I want to use the feature.

This looks like a truly innovative release that added some meaty new features to make Switchvox slicker and better than ever, without losing anything along the way. I'm looking forward to playing with more of the features and digger even deeper into the possibilities, and I'm starting to make some phone calls to clients to let them know that it's not only safe to upgrade, it's definitely worth it.