Unified Communications vendor 3CX announced their v15 release around Summer of 2016 and so in an effort to get up to speed on the latest software I thought I'd give you a brief walk through of this release.
I have embedded the official video in the article, it's well worth a watch and in particular the Q&A at the end is very interactive and informative.
- Zero Admin
- Faster Installation
- Improved security
- New appliance support for small business
- Enhanced management console
- Improved User Interface (UI)
- Open Integration
- Re-engineered Video Conferencing
- Even more competitive
Zero Admin PBX
It was announced in the live launch that all from the new home page dashboard admins can now see all critical messages in one place. All firmware updates and security updates are now automatic including firmware updates to IP phones.
A Standby license is now included in the Enterprise edition. This allows admins to have a fully resilient solution with an active instance of 3CX software ready to go in the event of a failure to primary 3CX host.
Faster Installation
3CX claims that a system can now be deployed in under 15 minutes making it the easiest system to deploy. In an effort to make life even easier for installers there is now no requirement to create a FQDN and buying and configuring a security certificate. Admins can now select a 3CX supplied FQDN with choice of sub domain and have the SSL certificates created and managed by 3CX.
Thanks to the 3CX provisioning service using the RPS server, remote IP phones are now even easier to configure.
Improved Security
All session border controller (SBC) tunnels are now automatically encrypted and the web server has been also locked down even tighter.
3CX have partnered with Let's Encrypt which provide SSL certificates free of charge. This now means all supported IP phones are connected back to the 3CX server using HTTPS, proving a much more secure way of connecting over the public internet (including all console connections to the server are now SSL).
New appliance support for small business
Where a dedicated server appliance is required in an office (where a virtual machine is not available), 3CX have now reduced the footprint of their code, so companies can now use smaller, more compact micro servers to install it on.
Underpinning the reduction of memory consumption was the move to the new NGINX web server. 3CX software will now run on miniPCs with Windows 8 or 10 operating systems that cost under $100. Nick Galea went onto say that this is a perfect environment for up to 32 simultaneous calls (subject to other engineering guidelines).
Enhanced management console
Utilising Google's latest web toolkit, it now sports a much sleeker and modern web interface. It's faster and more reliable allowing for a more intuitive user experience.
Day to day administration of the phones on your 3CX system has been made even easier, you can now log into the remote phone admin interfaces without separately logging in. (very nice)
SIP trunk configuration has also been made easier, you can now assign DDI numbers directly to extensions or queues. Therefore no need for inbound rules.
Improved User Interface of 3CX Client
Like all new software releases its always great to see an improved user interface (UI). In this release presence has been improved, new and improved themes with custom backgrounds.
Open Integration
3rd party integration with CRMs and help desk systems continues to be of high importance to 3CX. More apps are now supported out of the box, in fact 10 new integrations have now been released.
- Microsoft Outlook
- Salesforce
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Sugar CRM
- Act!
- Google Contacts
- MS Exchange
- Office 365
- Exact
- Freshdesk
- Datev
- Zendesk
- Nutshell
- Vtiger
- EBP
Plugins can now be deployed to client machines centrally from the management interface, in addition a new easy to use scripting interface is now built in which allows you to integrate virtually any CRM with your telephone system.
Re-engineered Video Conferencing
3CX have re-developed the core web conferencing functionality, their new single stream technology enables for better quality video using less bandwidth.
