PBXtra 4.0

Fonality have released a significant upgrade to their flagship hybrid-hosting platform, PBXtra 4.0. It's been over a year since the last release, and the time has not been frittered away. PBXtra has so many new features and improvements we're just going to hit the high points. The first one is its FindMe function has been so improved it might as well be called Stalker. Except you can turn it off. Anyway it uses a bit of clever artificial intelligence to determine presence—when it detects that your mouse or keyboard have not moved for a set period of time, it forwards your calls in whatever way you've configured forwarding. But what happens if you're already on the phone but not touching the computer? No problem, because you have already configured it to not go looking for you when you're already on the phone. It also finds your active SIP device no matter where you are, whether you're in the office or at a remote location.

The FindMe control panel lets you easily create complex FindMe rules, such as times of day and days of the week, whitelists, super-VIP priority whitelists, and blacklists. A new feature that goes along with FindMe is Boomerang Mobile Integration. Boomerang allows calls received on mobile phones to be "boomeranged" back to any extension with a few keypresses. You can also record calls and store them on your PBXtra server. FindMe requires HUD, which is a user control panel, system administrator monitoring, and control panel, click-to-call-email-chat-and-more interface. HUD is a wonderful time-saving application, which you can see for yourself by taking the free version for a test-drive. There is a new Call Screening feature that makes it easier than ever to screen your calls. Your callers must say their name, and then you decide if you want to accept the call, send it to voicemail, play a rude sound effect, or reject the call. (Actually there is no rude sound effect, but it wouldn't be difficult to implement one.)

Another new feature is Foncall. This is a Firefox plugin that lets you click on any phone number on a Web site to call it. Yet one more useful and cool new feature is a graphical FXS/FXO and T1 interface card configurator—configure your interface cards with a few mouse clicks. That's just the bits that I think are noteworthy; check out the release notes for an extensive list of new features and improvements.