Release Updates

It has been a very busy week with the Junction Networks developers. There are two new enhancements to the OnSIP Hosted PBX platform: External Phone Numbers in Groups and Call Details in Reports.

External Phone Numbers in Groups
Many of you have been asking for the ability to have external phone numbers (cell phones, home phones, etc.) as part of a Group. Now, with all Groups (found under the 'Groups' tab) you can have up to 10 addresses (users) in a group and up to three of them can be external phone numbers. This feature is now active and live in the OnSIP interface. With our $39.95 per month Hosted PBX plan, you get up to three Groups.

If you choose 'Simultaneous Ring' strategy, all users (and now external phone numbers) in the group are dialed at the same time. The first user to answer the call is handed the call. With the 'Hunt Group' strategy, calls are sent to each user individually up to the 'Ring Each for:' time limit.

With both group types, individual failover settings are over-ridden by the Group failover. That means that you can have a Group ring a set of users for up to two minutes and the call will not failover to any individual user's voicemail box because the group failover supersedes the user failover. However, this is not the case when there is an external phone number involved. If the external phone number 'answers' the call with voicemail before the Group failover timeout, then the external phone number will be given the call. Be sure to take this into account prior to assigning external phone numbers to groups.

Call Details
Until the most recent release, if you wanted to see individual call details you had to download the full Call Detail Record as a CSV (spreadsheet) file. Now, under the 'Reports' section if you click on any individual user, by default you still see their 'Summary' view, but you can now click on 'Show Detail' to see the last 25 calls made by that user. All of the inbound calls are still listed under the user listed as the 'Bill Calls To' user listed under the phone number itself under the 'Resources' tab.

We have a new voicemail feature slated for next week...

Hopefully you like the changes to our marketing WWW Sites, http://www.junctionnetworks.com and http://www.onsip.com. Our marketing department is right on track with our messaging. We are using the Drupal content management system which should allow us more timely updates to the site, our knowledgebase and our Blog.

In addition to the new marketing WWW sites, we have also launched a new User Portal. The User Portal allows all OnSIP Hosted PBX users to log into the system to see their settings. Previously, only account administrators were able to log into the interface. The User portal only contains information pertaining to that user and does not show any account-level information. The new User Portal also contains a newly revamped and updated knowledgebase.

While we were at it, we launched a new application: Conference Bridge for OnSIP. OnSIP users pay $19.95 per month for unlimited conference bridge use for up to 10 (ten) simultaneous callers. Any callers coming in via the PSTN would still pay the regular 2.9c/min.

As an update, we recently changed the pricing on our ACD Queues to $19.95 for the ability to have up to 5 callers in a queue simultaneously. Around the same time we launched “Announcements” under the “Apps” tab. Announcements allow you to play a recording to the caller and then send the caller to a new destination. This is useful for ‘business hours’ or ‘directions’ announcements within an IVR application. Lastly, we launched the “Inbound Bridge” application which allows a customer to purchase phone numbers (DID) for any other VoIP provider and ‘bridge’ those DIDs into the Junction Networks service.

The next big release for us will be the User Dashboard, but more about that later.

Please let us know what you think about our new WWW Sites and our new applications.

Hi Everyone,

It's been a few weeks since our last release but now we're back from the Holidays and we've begun working on new features again. This week we have just a few minor changes for you as most of our development efforts are being focused on a few larger projects to be announced later ;)

Anyway, today we've made a quick fix for a bug we saw pop up on our Groups page in IE 7.0 when users were attempting to create a new group.

The second update we're releasing today is the ability for account administrators to check the all the SIP registration details for registered phones. To do so:

1. navigate to the user's page
2. open the details for a specific user by clicking on that user's name
3. under "Maintenance" you will see the SIP Phone status as either "offline" or the number of currently registered phones for that user. If any phones are registered click "show details" to view the registration details for the user.

You will see registration information similar to the following for each registered device.

We have a new application for you this week!

Meet the Announcement application. Essentially this little guy is for playing a recording to an incoming caller and then forwarding them on to another address in your onSIP PBX. "How would I use this?" I'm glad you asked. Would you like to let your callers hear your hours of operation and then return to the main attendant menu or play a nice welcome message to incoming callers before sending them to a user or a queue, well here's your opportunity. To add an Announcement application, go to the Apps page and click "Create New Application", click on the Announcements image and all the details are explained there.

Being ever vigilant here at Junction Networks, we are always adding new features to our products and services. From now on we will be using our blog as a means of updating you with our latest additions, enhancements, and occasional bug fixes for our products and web portals.

Coming off of Thanksgiving week, we have a modest list of updates which include:

1. onSIP PBX Configuration View - see a complete view of your onSIP setup indexed by extension, phone number or address. Navigate to the "Account" page and click the "View current PBX config" link in order to see your printable report.
2. inhibit double form submission - our DOM guru has rewritten our ajax form handlers to only allow forms to be submitted once. This fixes a minor bug we were seeing where users may have accidentally clicked "save" twice while submitting a form.

Stay tuned for more updates.