[Freeswitch-users] FS Webinterfaces - Opinions on wikiPBX, blue.box, fusionPBX

[Christian Benke]

Hi!

I'm currently working on a PBX solution for customers of my
company(Small to medium businesses) and since i have to make sure my
colleagues and customers don't have to dig into the depths of
Freeswitch i need a graphical interface for the most mundane tasks.

I've spent the last week evaluating FusionPBX and while i was excited
at first, i stumbled over a few bugs(Which i could partially solve
myself) and had to dig a bit in the code, so i'm not that thrilled
anymore. Before i stay with FusionPBX and try to learn some more php
and work my way through the code(Is there no ORM in php or did Mark
just leave it out?) and add what i'm missing, i'd like to spend
another few days trying other projects.

Since it takes a while to get to understand a new webinterface and its
quirks, i wanted to ask here first if the other options are even worth
the time. I think the alternatives are blue.box and WikiPBX?

What i'm specifically looking for are:

- Proper AAA/groups
I want to be able to have a "root"-admin(SuperAdmin in FusionPBX) that
has access to the full GUI, a local admin(Admin in FusionPBX) that can
change call-relevant features like conferences, dialplans, follow me,
voicemail, CDRs and such and finally users, who can only change
settings for their own extension and have access to their voicemail
and CDRs. Ideally the root-admin should be able to modify what
options/features the "lower" groups are able to manipulate(Switch
on/off GUI-elements). FusionPBX offers that partially - but the "local
admin" has too much rights and i can't change its rights dynamically.

- A layer between GUI and configfiles(e.g. a database)
I'll have to do some bulk-provisioning with a script from csv-files
and if i can write user-information to a DB instead of creating
xml-files it would make my life easier

- Feature configuration
Dialplans are complex and individual and i can comprehend that i won't
find an interface that supports all the features i need.
FusionPBX was satisfying in this regard, i didn't miss too much and
while i couldn't trust a customer to setup his PBX with a complex
configuration with Time Conditions, Hunt Groups, Follow-Me etc. i
think at least our 2nd level support would be happy to use the gui
instead of tinkering with the flatfiles. And i hope my time allows me
to implement some of the needed features to FusionPBX(If i don't find
a better alternative).
Some of them are: Voicemail(Setup and file-access),
Huntgroups/FollowMe, Recording, Click2Call, Conferences, CDRs,
AutoAttendant/IVR, MOH, TimeConditions, Directory, BossSec/ChefSek and
other dubious features asked for by upper mgmt

- Phone provisioning
It would be nice to be able to add a MAC-adress to a newly created
extension and the rest is taken care of by the GUI-scripts. FusionPBX
has this feature, but i didn't have time to try it yet(And i'll have
to adapt the templates to fit the phones i'm going to use, hope it
really works). Nice to have, if not it shouldn't be too much work to
write a custom script that can take care of that, given provisioning
data from the GUI.

- Written in a language i don't have to learn(Python)
WikiPBX is based on Django - yes! "http://www.wikipbx.org/ -> Current
Status -> CDR issues improved -> 11 Feb 2010" - Crap! Is this project
as dead as it seems or is it just so mature there's no further
development needed? The screenshots look a bit minimalistic.


That's all i need in a perfect world. I guess none of the projects
mentioned above can do that for me - but i'd still love to hear your
opinions and experiences if it's even worth the time to install/try
any of them or stick with FusionPBX!

Cheers,
Christian