Noojee PBX 4.0 released

Noojee PBX 4.0 released

It’s finally here!

It’s been a long journey, but Noojee PBX 4.0 has finally arrived.

The 4.0 release is a refresh of almost every part of our product range including core PBX functionality, our predictive dialer, in bound, skills, routes, IVR and queues etc. With a few exceptions, which will be dealt with in 4.1, every page has been reworked with a fresh new look and more importantly a fresh modern and easy to use interface.

Our test and support team have been using 4.0 for some time now (we have already deployed it internally and to a small number of customers), and every time we have to go back to 3.5 we cringe at how much harder it is to do common tasks like adding an account or a handset. The 4.0 interface really makes a huge difference in usability and speed.

4.0 has really been focused on an improved user experience. There are a few new features which we are excited about, but most of the work has been around usability. Underpinning the work on improved usibilty was the adoption of a completely new Web 2.0 framework.

For you, this means that we can now innovate much faster and provide an easier to use interface.

The intent is to rollout the 4.0 release over the next four to six weeks. This period may be longer for some of our larger customers that use a large set of features. (e.g. recording, dialer, PBX, inbound, API and teams).

The intent is to run a number of group training sessions and our Training Manager will make contact to arrange these over the next couple of weeks.

The good news is that agents will not see much of a change, so agent training requirements should be fairly minimal. The only changes that agents will see are the new login screen, new ‘Agent’ menu and the new Call Editor. Noojee Vision and the dialer interface are essentially unchanged (from an agent’s perspective).

So now the changes:

Common

• Complete new look and feel provides a modern and pleasant interface with significant ease of use enhancements.
• Improved search on all screens makes it easier and faster to find things with just 3 or 4 keystrokes
• Simplified management screens makes it easier/faster to maintain accounts, handsets, routes, skills and groups (permission)
• Simplified creation of accounts and handsets with new ‘basic’ mode that just shows the things that you ‘need’ to enter.
• Reorganised menu structure makes it easy to find things.
• New Trunk feature (the service over which you make calls) includes the ability to:
  • ‘fail-over’ to an alternate trunk if the primary trunk goes down.
  • prioritise trunks to handle congestion (e.g. this trunk is too busy, so try the next one)
  • route calls to a trunk based on the number dialed.
• New feature matrix allows for fine-grained control over what features different users have access to.
• Accounts can now be safely deleted without affecting reporting.
• Improved help system which now ‘flies out’ from the left hand side, rather than taking up one third of the screen (already deployed to some 3.5 systems)
• Performance improvements across the system including ‘recordings’ and faster startup times for large allocations.

 

Agent

• New ‘Agent’ menu has all of the things an agent needs in one place.
• New login means:
  • staff no longer have to enter their ‘handset type’ as we now auto detect the handset.
  • a control mechanism stops a staff member stealing another users handset whilst the other user is logged in.
• Updated handset security model allows you to update handset permissions when staff move between locations or their IP address changes. You no longer need to ring Noojee, and in most cases you don’t even need to know what an IP address is.
• Ability to export most screens to a CSV file (Export CSV data on the Action menu within edit screens – bottom left)
• Ability to email handset configuration to a user (from the Accounts Action menu)
• Ability to email a password reset to a user (from the Accounts Action menu).
• Ability to play back recordings directly from the Call Editor
• New agent view in the Call Editor presents the data in the same format that Agents entered the data.

 

Team

• New/Improved team management: create Team Leaders for live monitoring of calls and access to recordings.
• New dynamic teams allows user to select the team they will work for at login, which affects what queues they will answer calls for on that day (essentially narrows the skills based queues they see during that session).

 

Campaigner (Dialer)

• Improved Caller ID management: set Caller ID per account or campaign.
• Caller ID pool for campaigns: each time you dial a lead, a different DID is displayed from the Caller ID pool.
• Ability to play back recordings directly from the Call Editor
• New agent view in the Call Editor presents the data in the same format that agents entered the data.
• New ‘Preview’ mode in the campaign template lets you preview and test a screen layout and disposition actions without having to dial.
• Improvements to the Lead Injector (used for web to lead and automating campaign imports) improves performance for large imports.
• Disposition action improvements make it easy to set up an email action or move a lead into another campaign
• Disposition actions are now scriptable, meaning that Noojee or your IT team can create new types of actions that can do just about anything when a dialer call completes.

 

PBX

• Improved Caller ID management, and set Caller ID per account. This removes the need to use the difficult to use Caller ID Mask.
• Simplified Route management
• New whitepages (renamed ‘Contacts’) with improved search and click to dial.

 

Inbound

• Noojee Vision now provides faster updates when a user or queue changes state.
• New dynamic teams allows user to select the team they will work for at login, which affects what queues they will answer calls for on that day (essentially narrows the skills based queues they see during that session).
• Improved route management makes it easy to maintain large numbers of routes.

 

Bug fixes

There have also been vast numbers of bug fixes in 4.0. During the 4.0 development cycle we found over 500 bugs, all of which had to be fixed to get this release out the door.

Noojee PBX 4.0 has gone through the largest test cycle that we have ever applied to a release and our test team are confident that we are releasing a solid product. There will however always be gotchas which is why will be taking a cautious approach to the roll out.

Internally Noojee has been running the new version for almost a month even whilst the development team has been fixing those last few bugs. To date, with the exception of a few minor issues (already fixed), the system has been running flawlessly.

 

Going forward

We already have 4.1 and further versions planned:

• Rewrite of the dialer page in preparation for blender and full multi-channel
• Routes V2: this complete re-work of how we route calls will provide significant improvements in how calls can be routed along with improvements in time zone handling and diagnosing routing issues along with a new IVR builder.
• Blender: the ability for an agent to seamlessly handling inbound and dialer calls.
• Teams: further improvements to team management
• Billing System: Whilst not part of Noojee PBX ,we are also on the cusp of releasing a new version of our billing system and portal.
• Website: finally we are only weeks away from launching our new website so look out for the announcement.