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A2Billing 1.8.5 and CDR-Stats 1.2.0

February 3rd, 2011

It has been a while since we have last posted, but that is not a reflection on the work that has been going on here. We have been very busy with new development on A2Billing and our other projects.

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

Back From Astricon 2010

November 5th, 2010

Star2Billing was kindly invited by Digium to attend Astricon in Washington DC this year where they donated an Open Source stand, sharing the floor with such Open Source notables as the FreePBX, Astlinux, OpenBTS, The 2600 Project, and The Atlanta Asterisk Users Group.

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.

Star2Billing News – Lots to tell!

October 6th, 2010

A2Billing 1.8.1 - http://trac.asterisk2billing.org

A2Billing 1.8.1 has been released. It includes the usual round of bug fixes, as well as some new call-back features sponsored by our customers, one being the way we answer the call to make A2Billing more compatible with Mobile Phone Call-Back Dialler software, and another feature called IVR call-back, where the customer is prompted for the number to call first, then the system calls them back and connects them. This feature was designed to circumvent tone clamping which some operators use to prevent call-back services from working.

Additionally, A2Billing has been updated to support PHP 5.3, one of the reasons for this is that Star2Billing are adopting Ubuntu LTS 10.0.4 Server edition as the base operating system for our commercial installs. Initial tests on this new operating system have been very pleasing.

CDR-Stats 1.1.0 - http://www.cdr-stats.org

Some months ago, we released version 1 of CDR-Stats, to replace the 8 year old Asterisk–Stat. Development of CDR-Stats has continued apace, and we are now pleased to release version 1.1.0

This release includes a number of new features, including Concurrent Calls, and an interactive Global Statistics feature, as well as ACL login to restrict which CDR a user can see and what he can do. Additionally, CDR can be imported from other systems and CDR-Stats used to analyse the CDR. We will be releasing shell scripts to assist anyone who wants to install this for themselves on their own PBX and Asterisk installations. Watch the news at www.star2billing.com for more details on these as they are released.

Astricon 2010 - http://www.astricon.net

Star2Billing have been given an Open Source desk by Digium at Astricon in Washington this year, and both Joe and Areski will be attending. We would be pleased to meet any of our customers and users, past present or future. Drop us an email at [email protected] to arrange to meet.

VoIP2Day 7th October 2010 - http://www.voip2day.net/2010/en/

Star2Billing have been invited to speak on their popular IP-Centrex and Multi-Tenant PBX solution at the VoIP2Day conference in Madrid, and will be giving an overview of how this product is assembled out of Open Source components including A2Billing.

The Village Telco Project - http://www.villagetelco.org

Areski is flying down to South Africa this week to see the official launch of the Village Telco Project which is sponsored by the Shuttleworth Foundation. To read more about Mesh Potatoes, and the purpose of this charity, seehttp://www.villagetelco.org/. Star2Billing have done a lot of development of A2Billing to assist this project, the most recent of which was to introduce an IVR so you could phone your A2Billing platform and hear the daily statistics in terms of calls, minutes, and profit.

Conclusion

At the end of this month, Star2Billing S.L. celebrates one year of trading, while A2Billing has been going for nearly 6 years now, and CDR-Stats (formerly known as Asterisk-stat) about 8 years. We are going from strength to strength as you may infer from this lengthy newsletter; so we offer our thanks to the continued support of our Community and our Customers. That’s all for now, keep an eye on Twitter (@a2billing), our forums, and our new Star2Billing News Page athttp://www.star2billing.com/posts/ for recent developments.

AstriCon – 2010

September 15th, 2010

Star2Billing have been invited by Digium to display at this year’s AstriCon on the Open Source Desks.

AstriCon is now in its seventh year, and is the official conference for Asterisk users. Its stated mission is to expand awareness and knowledge of Asterisk over the course of a three day conference and exhibition from the 26th October to the 28th of October 2010, at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Centre.

Jonathan “Joe” Roper and Arezqui “Areski” Belaid, the Principles of Star2Biling will be attending, and we look forward to meeting some of our users of A2Billing, and would be pleased to set up appointments at the conference with anyone who would like to discuss their A2Billing project with us face to face.

For more information on AstriCon, Please see their website at http://www.astricon.net/

Star2Billing to Present at VoIP2DAY, Madrid

September 15th, 2010

Star2Billing have been invited to present at VoIP2DAY in Madrid on the 7th of October, 2010, and Joe Roper will be discussing building Multi-Tenant PBX systems and IP-Centrex services from Open Source free components.

VoIP2DAY was started in 2008 as a conference and exhibition for the world of Voice over IP and Video over IP in the Iberian Market and is attended by some of the major manufacturers, distributors and integrators, and takes place over the course of three days, from the 5th to the 7th of October 2010 in Madrid.

For more information, please go to their website at http://www.voip2day.net/2010/

We look forward to meeting any of our past, present or future users of A2Billing who may be able to attend.

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VoIP Billing Solutions