Newfies-Dialer Launched

Work began on Newfies-Dialer at the beginning of the year, a mass voice broadcasting and auto-dialer software used for emergency broadcasting, telemarketing and a range other applications.

Newfies-Dialer Dashboard

We announced Newfies-Dialer in April, and after much development and testing, is ready for production. It is a well rounded product with a great deal of potential for all organisations and telecoms service providers that need to broadcast voice messages to a large number of people in a short space of time.

We have spent a lot of time on the documentation for developers and users alike, including a beginners guide so anyone can build a Newfies-Dialer system with our automated installation scripts and get involved.

CDR-Stats Updated

CDR-stats 1.4, the replacement for Asterisk-Stat used in FreePBX for CDR reporting, has been released, and again we provide installation scripts that have been tested on the major FreePBX based aggregations.

CDR-Stats - Call Statistics

The CDR-Stats tool is a useful addition to the IP-PBX systems integrator, as it allows provides detailed reporting on Call Data Records and Statistics for the end customer.

A2Billing Enhanced

A2Billing has also been updated, providing even more functionality, especially for DID resale. Updates have been made in respect of security and usability, and we would encourage anyone not using the latest version, currently 1.9.4, to upgrade.

A2Billing, VoIP Billing Software

New Development

We are still busy developing the next generation of A2Billing, as well as an SMS system designed for providing web based SMS messages to end customers and wholesale operations as well as adding new features and functionalities to Newfies-Dialer.

We are looking forward to 2012 and we would like to wish our customers and users, past present and future, the season’s greetings and a fantastic new year.

Yours,

Areski, Joe, and the Star2Billing Team

Newfies-Dialer, is voice broadcasting and auto-dialling solution to allow you to call thousands of contacts delivering emergency and marketing messages. It can also be used to provide custom IVR which can be used for surveys, polls and voting applications.

Areski will discuss the operation of the system as well as the technical aspects of its development that allow Newfies-Dialer to scale, making incredible numbers of calls. He will be available for questions and answers during the conference.

To participate, please call the conference at 1700 UTC (1200 CDT / 1PM EDT) by calling sip:888@conference.freeswitch.org or via the PSTN at +1-919-386-9900. More details and the recording can be found at http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Weekly_Conference_Call

Voice Broadcasting is a powerful business tool to automate phone calls for mass marketing, appointment reminders, delivery confirmations, debt collection, phone voting and surveys, automated teleconferencing and to relay vital information to your contacts over the phone.

Newfies-Dialer is a capable auto-dialer software application, and coupled with Freeswitch, provides a scalable auto-dialer system which can auto-dial thousands or even millions of phones per day for a range of businesses and telecoms service providers who wish to provide automated outbound calling as a service to their customers.

Newfies-Dialer can outbound calls over multiple Freeswitch instances offering almost limitless capacity, supporting  multiple users, each with their own configurable settings. There are a range of API’s to offer full control to system integrators for external third party applications.

The Newfies-Dialer Voice Broadcasting Platform is assembled entirely from free and Open Source components including Freeswitch, Plivo, RabbitMQ/Redis, Celery and Django.

For more details on Newfies-Dialer including comprehensive installation guides, an automated install script, user manuals and developer’s documentation view http://www.newfies-dialer.org or contact us.

Newfies-Dialer Dashboard

We are pleased to announce that we have released Newfies-Dialer RC3 today.

For more information, please see http://www.newfies-dialer.org/newfies-dialer-v1-0-rc3-released/

Voice Broadcasting is a powerful business tool to automate phone calls for appointment reminders, delivery confirmations, event promotion, debt control, IVR campaigns, phone voting and surveys, automated teleconferencing and to relay vital information to your contacts over the phone.

Although Newfies-Dialer can be installed in house on a single server, it has messaging support allowing distributed call processing across multiple cloud servers to make millions of outbound calls per day.

The comprehensive web interface allows every aspect of the campaign to be controlled with management and customer reports on aspects of the campaign.

Newfies-Dialer is a multi-user system so that multiple campaigns can be run simultaneously for numerous customers who can each manage their campaigns individually, thus making it suitable for service providers wishing to provide voice broadcast services.

The Newfies-Dialer Voice Broadcasting Platform is assembled entirely from free and open source components including Freeswitch, Django, Plivo, Celery and RabbitMQ.

For more details on Newfies-Dialer including comprehensive installation guides, an automated install script, user manuals and developer’s documentation view http://www.newfies-dialer.org

We also remind you that A2Billing version 1.9, (Cuprum edition), added some exciting new features to the A2Billing Softswitch, not least, A-Leg billing giving A2Billing Administrators the opportunity to charge for the ingress leg of a DID, and add it to the cost of the B-Leg.

The A2Billing Softswitch is a flexible and capable DID resale platform with facilities not only to bill per minute for DID, e.g. for toll-free numbers, but can credit a customer’s account for Revenue Share Numbers.

This adds to the already long list of roles that A2Billing fulfil, including, but not limited to, calling card services, VoIP termination and billing for residential, business and wholesale markets and callback, all complete with flexible billing options, customer portal and online signup and payments.

Star2Billing, The Company that sponsors the A2Billing Project, provides details about Star2Billing’s products, services and solutions on its website at http://www.star2billing.com. Costs for an entry level A2Billing Softswitch, bundled with training and support, can be found at http://www.star2billing.com/consultancy/managed-install/

Yours,
Areski, Joe, and the Star2Billing Team

CDR-stats is a replacement for Asterisk-Stats, first released over eight years ago by Areski, The Author of CDR-Stats. Anyone who has used the Call Data Reports in FreePBX will be familiar with Asterisk-Stats as this forms the core of CDR reporting in FreePBX.

CDR-Stats allows reports to be generated in different formats over varying time periods with filters and graphs to compare periods of traffic.

Version 1.3 of CDR-Stats includes a number of enhancements such as providing ACL access to CDR so that users can be controlled in what they are allowed to see. There is more information, screen prints and instructions at http://www.cdr-stats.org

Many of the FreePBX aggregations do not implement ACL access, so if a PBX administrator wants to give access to users to inspect the PBX CDR, then access to the whole PBX is unavoidable, therefore installing CDR-Stats alongside an existing system will allow users to analyse their CDR without compromising the rest of the configuration.

A script to install CDR-Stats on CentOS / Asterisk / FreePBX or Asterisk-Stats systems has been included to make installation quick and easy for users of AsteriskNow, Trixbox, Elastix, and PBX in a Flash.

We invite you to download and install CDR-Stats. If you have any difficulties, or need assistance with the installation, then commercial support is available from Star2Billing.

Yours

Areski, Joe and the Star2Billing Team
http://www.star2billing.com/

As A2Billing enters its 7th year of providing its Open Source Switch and Billing system, version 1.9 has been released which includes a number of exciting new features.

One of the most important of the new features of A2Billing is A-Leg charging, that is to say billing per minute on the ingress leg of the call for DID resale and delivery.

The A-Leg features allow for a number of new products with flexible pricing that can easily be configured and marketed to your customers. For instance:

• Geographic telephone numbers billed per minute in addition to a monthly rental.
  
• Non-Geographic numbers Billed per minute, with a monthly rental, such as toll-free services.
  
• Revenue Share numbers, with the ability to credit a customer’s account when those numbers are called.
  
• On-net calling.
  
• Voice conferencing service billed per user per minute.
  

Needless to say, there have been a number of bug fixes and security enhancements so we would urge you to upgrade. We have moved development onto Github, so you can follow our work at https://github.com/Star2Billing/a2billing

Upgrades on the systems previously installed by us are quick and easy, so if you want to upgrade, then please contact us for pricing. For those wanting a commercial install with training and, optionally, ongoing support, may wish to consider our Managed Install Bundle as described at http://www.star2billing.com/consultancy/managed-install/

Yours

Areski & Joe, and the rest of The Star2Billing Team

Version 1.8.5 of A2Billing has been released over one month ago, and this includes a fantastic new feature long awaited in A2Billing. A Leg Billing.

A2Billing now has the capability to bill the ingress link or A-Leg on a DID. So for instance, where you want to resell toll-free DID to your customers, you can now place an ingress charge on the inbound leg and add it to the B-Leg, or egress charge.

We have made this new feature even more flexible to account for resale of premium rated and revenue share numbers. We allow negative rates to be entered, which means that customers can accrue credit each time that someone calls their premium rated number.

We have moved our development onto Github, where we are in very good company with such open source projects as Android, the Open Source Mobile Phone Operating System. All future A2Billing development will take place here, and you can easily see the progress being made on the Github interface.

The latest version of A2Billing, 1.8.5 can now be downloaded from Github .

Also released is CDR-Stats 1.2.0, which includes some bug fixes, and we have included a shell script to install CDR-Stats on CentOS based FreePBX systems.

As we start 2011, we look forward to telling you about the new projects and products we have in development over the coming months.

Yours

The Star2Billing Team

Our special thanks go to John Mullinux of http://www.cohutta.com and Steve Henke of http://www.xelatec.com, both stalwarts of The Atlanta Asterisk Users Group. Not only did they arrange to print our advertising collateral, they also picked us up from the airport after an epic drive from the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Although one of the main things we came to talk about was A2Billing, but there was a great deal of interest in our CDR-Stats project, http://www.cdr-stats.org the latest version of which (1.1.0) has been recently released, that allows the analysis and reporting on Asterisk CDR. We expect to be releasing install scripts for Asterisk, and various FreePBX /Asterisk aggregations.

Also on display, and creating a lot of interest was the new Mesh Potato, a mesh wireless device, and combined with an ATA (Analogue Telephone Adapter), just brought back from South Africa, where Areski, our Technical Director has been assisting with the Village Telco charity, see http://www.villagetelco.org.

We also previewed Pow2Wow, and web based conference manager for Asterisk, which we expect to release early in the new year replacing one of Areski’s earliest open source projects, WebMeetme.

We were however at Astricon to talk about A2Billing, and we were pleased to meet a large number of A2Billing users and customers, as well as some of the stars in the Asterisk world, such as Allison Smith, the voice of Asterisk, David Duffet, probably the world’s most prolific Asterisk trainer, Mark Spencer who should need no introduction, and some of the Asterisk development team such as Russell Bryant, Leif Madsen and Olle Johansson, to name a few.
Also at the conference, Digium made a number of announcements:-

• A new Wiki at https://wiki.asterisk.org
• Asterisk 1.8 released, supported for at least the next four years, with lots of valuable additions.
• Asterisk SCF  (Scalable Communications Framework) where seamless fail-over to another server was demonstrated, mid conference call! Clearly this has huge implications for A2Billing, and we will keep you informed as this project develops.

We look forward to seeing our friends in The Asterisk Community at next year’s Astricon as well as any of our customers, past present or future. We highly recommend a visit.

Yours truly,

Areski, Joe and the Star2Billing Team.