Resources

    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...

  AustenTel has developed a Cloud SBC for 3CX and works well on other platforms like Cisco. Our team has spent three years developing this solution for 3CX. We are a 3CX Platinum Partner and host around 3500 extensions for multiple schools, cities and business in Texas. We built the platform for our own use, but have since decided to release it to other 3CX partners that want a solution that requires no on premise solution, like 3CX SBC on a Raspberry PII. This Cloud SBC allows you to provision your endpoints to your 3CX on any Cloud platform, including 3CX’s hosted platform. We are currently developing a WebUI so that there will be some statistics and feedback from you endpoints. This should be on our site in the second quarter of 2022. In the meantime we can still provision your extensions and you will be amazed at the quality of the calls and easy provisioning. We also offer 3CX support and hosting for your 3CX server that includes our Cloud SBC in the hosting packag...

   3CX SBC v16 3CX SBC works great for small and medium sized businesses. The biggest issue I have seen is that it is deployed on Windows which is susceptible to Windows updates and just generally Windows desktop should not be used as a server. Let’s be honest the Raspberry Pi is a cool little box and we have run Citrix zero clients on it as a dummy terminal, but do you really want your phone system to depend on a plastic box the size of a pack of cigarettes? If you are going to install 3CX’s SBC there are limitations on amount of concurrent calls, phones and BLF’s. If you install it in an environment that needs to be up, put it on a server not a Windows desktop. I know a school district in North Texas that hired a company out of Wichita Falls to implement their 3CX uhmmmm…. At the High School they put the 3CX on the Librarian’s desktop, she went home early and shut her computer down and 3CX for the High School! So now I will tell you that we have a Linux based SBC...

   3CX Hosted PBX Done Right In my last post I discussed that 3CX is Cloud Ready on Azure. That is a somewhat bold statement considering what it takes to actually architect a correct solution in the real world. There is a lot to consider when designing an IP PBX that is functional and operational, one that you would be proud of. When I say proud, the primary criteria would be that the end users or consumers of the voice service are happy customers, the voice quality is clear, the Apps work, and the phones operate flawlessly. If you really consider all of these factors, on it’s face it seems so easy! IP PBX vendors make money off of sales of their products. At the end of the day the IT professional (now also considered the telephone guy) has to be able to support the solution and make the end users happy. We IT guys and gals out there know it takes a lot more to make that happen than simply spinning up a box on Azure or AWS. There are many components that...

  3CX V15 is Gaining Ground on Azure Good morning! Well since I last blogged about 3CX on Azure a lot has changed in the world of 3CX. Namely, 3CX V15 was released in the last quarter of 2016 for GA. As a 3CX partner we had access to the beta release and we were able to test it again on Azure. 3CX V15 works great on Azure, there is no multi-tenant version moving forward from V14, so the port requirements that I had blogged about earlier are now gone. 3CX V15 uses HTTPS and regular SIP ports, so there is no need for 1:1 NAT mappings to multiple ports like there was on V14. 3CX has also released the Linux version of the PBX and it is not for Linux novices in my opinion. For a hosted PBX voice solution the 3CX V15 Linux boxes have a very small footprint and is designed with hosting providers in mind. 3CX is moving their model to be more cloud friendly on Azure and AWS. There are some concerns I think that need to be addressed though. Setting up 3CX right out of the box is ...