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Repurpose Cisco Phones to work with 3CX

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   Give your Cisco phones a new life with 3CX Since we have been deploying the 3CX platform over the last six months we have had success repurposing Cisco phones to the 3CX platform. We have a school district in north Texas that is in a proof of concept phase and currently has a Cisco phone system. We have helped him over the last three years upgrade his phone system, even though we saved him money on the labor for the upgrades he is facing a huge Smartnet renewal. The issue with the current phone systems is that they are expensive, hard to upgrade and did I say expensive  100mg viagra . Why should you spend tens of thousands of dollars on a phone system? The 3CX platform performs as well and is sometimes less than a third of what a new Cisco phone system runs. The school was facing a forklift upgrade of hardware and software, that would have cost approximately $25,000.00. Repurposing the Cisco phones saved him $50,000.00 in new phones and allows him to retire the Cisco phones and repl
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GoDaddy revokes 9,000 certificates you need some help?

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    Last week some of our customers were affected by GoDaddy revoking SSL certificates, which in turn brought down a lot of secure sites and services like ADFS. If you are using a GoDaddy SSL certificate I would run, not walk to another public SSL certificate provider. Here is the statement from GoDaddy; Due to a software bug, the recently issued certificate for your domain was issued without proper domain validation, and in accordance with industry standards as a Certificate Authority, we will need to revoke your certificate as a precautionary measure. The certificate will be revoked today (January 10) by 9pm Pacific Time. The software bug that created the issue has been remedied. We continue to closely monitor our system. In today’s world with tens of thousands of customers using single sign-on (SSO) with services like Azure, Office 365, Sharepoint, Sharefile and many others this GoDaddy certificate issue is significant and completely unnecessary. This was a result, not of a “BUG”, b
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Configuring 3CX for Cisco 7942

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   Setting up a Cisco 7942 as a custom template for the 3CX PBX Good morning from Minnesota! No, I live in Texas but I am in Minnesota working, anyway on to my post. Yesterday I talked about how to save money by repurposing Cisco phones to use with the 3CX PBX system. The customer I mentioned yesterday, the school district, has some 3CX supported phones – Cisco 7940, 7941 and 7960. However, he also has Cisco 7942’s and guess what, there is no template for those phones. Just as a disclaimer, 3CX did not test the Cisco 7942 as a supported phone, but the template I created works fine with the 7942 and he only has about 12 of these, to save money he said he is willing to take the chance. So let’s get to it. This guide is for your benefit, I am not responsible for your PBX. Also, if you’re running a 3CX virtual PBX creating a template and putting in the phones directory, I’ll show you the path, doesn’t mean you will see the template in the 3CX web console. There is a process to save the Cis
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3CX on Azure is the Cloud Ready for PBX?

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  3CX on Azure Maybe the Standalone Version As an entrepreneur in the IT Industry I am always looking for new opportunities in IT. Is 3CX on Azure one of those opportunities? Our company, Austen Consultants is always on the hunt for new streams of revenue. It became apparent that VOIP is finally becoming affordable for everyone; the competitors like Cisco and the days of a 50,000 dollar investment to obtain an Enterprise IP PBX are over. We first came across 3CX while doing research for a school district. A simple Google search for IP PBX and there it was…3CX. They were one of the first to come up in the search and within days we had a POC and shortly after, were signed up as a reseller and had our NFR Keys. I will go into more about this in another blog post. For now let’s talk about how and why we tested 3CX on Azure and vCloud Air. 3CX on Azure Our company is a Microsoft Partner as well and use Microsoft Action Pack so we get $200 a month credits on Azure, perfect for a test bed for
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3CX Installation on vCloud Air

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   Welcome back for part two of 3CX in the cloud series. In part one I covered how 3CX functioned on Microsoft Azure. Today I will write about my experience installing the system on vCloud Air by vmWare. Again as a Hosted Voice company we were testing out 3CX on vCloud Air for our own selfishness. We wanted to see if we could host the 3CX Virtual PBX in the cloud so we could be up and running immediately and have little to no cost for our startup Hosted IP PBX system. If you read part one on Azure you saw that as of this writing 3CX Virtual PBX did not function correctly or as expected. The standalone version worked fine and I would recommend it on Azure. vCloud Air is similar to Azure and Amazon AWS, another cloud product where you can pay by the hour for your server. One thing that made me leary to start was the rumors that vmWare may not be developing vCloud Air anymore, scary! I wanted to have a robust platform to for our Hosted Voice using VOIP. To think I would put my eggs in tha
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3CX Hosting

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  So when I first started working with 3CX back in version 12 I believe we had a single “Multi-Tenant” version of 3CX on a Windows Server 2008R2 box. Had to open up separate ports for every client it worked but management was tough! I am a Data Center Architect by trade and it was rough so I can’t imagine what a layman user did! We have since graduated those days, 3CX is now hosted in our Data Center in Dallas Texas on a VMware vSAN cluster, Cisco Nexus Network Infrastructure, Palo alto Firewalls and a healthy ISP with two Gigabit DIA connections. Since 3CX does very well on Debian we deploy a seperate server for each client. We have had very good success with the Linux Distro’s of 3CX, very stable and they are purpose built for 3CX. I have blogged about deploying 3CX on Azure a couple of times. I still have issues with going to Azure with 3CX, Azure is so cryptic about their pricing and for us as a 3CX Hosted Provider we have to get our costs down so we know exactly what we are paying
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3CX Hosted Voice Scores High Marks

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Jacksboro Independent School District  (ISD) is a public school district based in Jacksboro, Texas. Jacksboro ISD receives funding under a U.S. federal program called E-rate, which provides schools with discounts on telecommunications services to support connectivity and Internet use. E-rate began to phase out funding for voice service in the last year, shifting its contributions to support advanced communications systems instead.   The school district wanted to preserve the considerable funding it received from the E-Rate program, but that meant a major overhaul of its legacy Cisco phone system, one that would have cost more than $50,000. Maintenance on its current phone system was complex and costly, and Jacksboro ISD wanted to spend less and cut down on administration time. The school district also wanted to cut communications costs which were up to $2,500 per month, with extra costs for 200 DIDs. To find an alternative, Jacksboro ISD Director of Technology/Support Services: Brett T
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