VOIP Tech Chat → Re: Once again I am reminded of why I dislike "Incredible" PBX

You'd better start to learn "stupid commands", because Windows is moving more and more to PowerShell.

Old dogs, new tricks, all that jazz. Everything is on a unmaintainable script including old tired antagonisms.

Now you're being ridiculous, and preachy. How often do you suppose typical Windows users will ever go into PowerShell? And if by some chance that really is the case, then I guess it's a good thing I'm using OS X on my desktop system. Also, I seriously doubt Windows commands would ever be as arcane and non-mnemonic as Linux commands.

No matter what Microsoft does, I highly doubt the day will come when Windows users won't have access to some kind of GUI that keeps them away from the shell if they don't want to use it, even if that GUI comes from a third party. Even in Ubuntu Desktop I can do just about everything I need to do from the GUI, it's only when in a server version of Linux that I install and use Webmin.

You can lead a horse to water, but…

- How to install XiVO on a standard Linux system and on a Raspberry Pi
- How to create an extension
- How to set up voicemail for that extension
- How to create a trunk (SIP and Google Voice (Simonics or roll-your-own), maybe IAX also)
- How to route outgoing calls from the extension to the trunk ** If you want trunks dedicated to specific extensions, set up Multi-Tenant.
- How to create an IVR
- How to route calls from a trunk to an IVR, Extension, or an extension's voicemail, based on the incoming DID.
- How to answer a call with an announcement, then send it to an IVR or Extension.
- How to change the destination of incoming calls based on the time of day and/or day of week ** Known as Schedules in XiVO **
- How to create a ring group and have it ring all extensions/outside numbers simultaneously, or ring the first non-busy destination on the list, or try them in a specific order. Same for a follow-me (the latter is triggered only when a specific extension is called)
- How to create internal feature codes ** Exactly like custom_extensions in FreePBX: ConfigurationFiles.xivo_extrafeatures.conf **
- How to set up the Asterisk Blacklist
- How to block incoming or outgoing calls to/from non-existent, high cost, and/or high scam probability area codes ** same approach as in FreePBX **

PLENTY OF ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION HERE.

That's all great but you missed my main point. Your links jump all over the place, some to your site, some to other sites, and there's no real flow to this information. It would be far more helpful if there were, say, a book by an author (preferably one that uses a plain-vanilla version of XiVO) that lays all this out in sequence.

But also, your links confirm my other point, which is that at the current time, many things are more difficult in XiVO than they are in FreePBX. In some cases (IVR's being the prime example) you show dialplan rather than a configuration page, such as in found in FreePBX. Just looking through your links, almost everything looked to be anywhere from about the same degree of difficulty to significantly more difficult, compared to accomplishing the same task using FreePBX's GUI. I could go through your links step by step and comment on them, but I don't really have the time to do that right now. But I did want to comment on one specific thing:Seriously? Something that can be done VERY easily in FreePBX using Asterisk's so-called "ex-girlfriend logic" (I'm not making that up) requires that you enable Multi-Tenant in XiVO? This is a perfect example of something that is easy in FreePBX, but more difficult in XiVO.

Nevertheless I'm sure your list of links will be quite helpful to those that wish to explore XiVO in its current state. The type of people who'd rather use the Linux command line than a helpful GUI should love XiVO. I am not saying that XiVO is insurmountably difficult, just that at this point in time the degree of difficulty is still high enough to make me lose my enthusiasm for it. I hope that will change over the course of the next year or two.

I suspect the only reason FreePBX is so well polished is because in the early days (particularly the Asterisk@Home days) the developer(s) were much more receptive to user suggestions. Therefore if users said "We need an easy way to create an IVR", someone would code a module to assist with IVR creation. Sadly those days seem to be long gone for FreePBX (at least the "free" part of it) but I wonder if the XiVO developers are still receptive to suggestions, or if they have already reached the point where "what you get is what you get"?

I think the nicest way of responding is to say that XiVO wasn't designed for someone wanting a Raspberry Pi 2 at home to play with. It's a real-time Asterisk system and with that comes both enormous flexibility and, yes, more complexity. It also requires more horsepower than a vanilla Asterisk system. People use XiVO to run actual businesses and call centers.

You've made pretty clear that you have no intention of using XiVO and, if your computer inventory consists solely of a Raspberry Pi 2, you've made the right decision. Your comments also make perfectly clear that you have never even looked at the XiVO product. If you had, you would understand how silly some of your questions and comments actually are. Just to give an example, a 10 year old could figure out XiVO Ring Groups with about 3 mouse clicks.

As I said at the outset, folks will use products that they want to use, and that's perfectly fine. But that really doesn't necessitate bad mouthing some other product which you've never even tried much less used. How could you possibly know what it will and will not do?

As for jumping all over the map to provide you with answers, I was attempting to document that THERE ARE MULTIPLE SOURCES that address all of the so-called problems that you suggested had no answers. If you want a single tutorial that covers everything without jumping around, I provided that as well: »nerdvittles.com/?p=18734. You've obviously never looked at it either.

More like "you get what you pay for, but if you're lucky we'll do stuff for you for free or if we think we could potentially make some money off it."

Which is exactly what should be expected. That anyone does anything or gives away anything for free is kind enough; that they will then follow up by doing what people ask (still for free) is astonishing. That anyone EXPECTS people to do something for them for free is baffling.

I am really about done with this thread, everyone is talking in circles here, but I just want to respond to this. People create software for all kinds of reasons. For some it is a labor of love, for others it's a way to provide a service to others, and then for some it's all about the money. What's a bit disheartening is when a project that starts out in one of the first two categories gets bought out by a corporation and morphs into the third.

Suggestions for improvement are not the same as demands, or "expecting someone to do something for free". At this point I have a choice of different software I can use, and naturally I am going to use the one that best meets my needs, and in my case one of those needs is simplicity of use. Part of the reason for that is that one of these days someone might need to take over operation of the PBX that's even less knowledgeable about this stuff than I (particularly about the PBX software) and if it's not simple they'll probably not be able to figure it out.

So if I say that I might use a particular piece of software were it not for this or that, that's not "demanding" or "expecting" that someone will hop to, just because I expressed an interest. I've had it in my mind to revisit XiVO in a year or two; maybe it will have advanced enough that I feel I can use it, and maybe it won't. If it doesn't, I'll use something else.

The only reason I even started this thread was because I felt I had wasted my time because Ward had said you could pick the "Incredible" addons you install in Incredible PBX now, and it turned out that wasn't true in the Raspberry Pi version.

I'm ALMOST always grateful if someone creates software for free. The only exception to that is when I feel the existence of a bad product has stifled development of better products (whether it is free or paid is immaterial). If I specifically request a feature from a software developer and they actually provide it, I am always grateful for that, and I always thank them. Here my comments are not so much requests as opinions, that if XiVO were easier to configure it might attract more users. If as Ward suggests they only want to attract business and call center users, that's fine.

At this point I think we have beaten several horses to death. I say something, someone tries to twist my words, put words in my mouth, or add something I never said, and then they respond to that. And this thread slowly swirls down the drain.

Not true, but honestly I'm sick to death of this whole discussion. You're right, at the present time XiVO isn't the right choice for someone like me, and neither is any version of the "Incredible" PBX, for that matter. Can we now get on with our lives?

I apologize for being mistaken about the intention of your writing.

Curious why you didn't post this in the Incredible PBX forum for a more focused discussion and feature request.

Apology accepted. The reason I don't post there is because I don't have an account on that forum.

I know you've stated that you're done here, and the following strays even further from the point of this thread but I would like to raise a point from my view as an erstwhile volunteer developer. You state you're not a dev, even so, it is clear you have invested countless hours into gaining knowledge as a user. Imagine the time investment required to do that and also write, debug and test code, write docs, provide user support, etc. The more popular your project, the more user requests, bug reports, corner cases, weird things that only come up for non-English alphabets where the user can barely make their issue understood to you, etc. The demands on your time can be huge. What starts as a fun project turns into a job, maybe still rewarding, but perhaps not as fun. More time goes by and maybe it becomes less rewarding, if you don't get significant long term help from others, sooner or later your enthusiasm wanes and your contributions slow down or stop. Very few will work indefinitely for near-zero compensation, nor is it reasonable to expect them to. It is the literal definition of unsustainable. So imagine a fictional tireless volunteer, on the cusp of abandoning years of effort with no team members willing to take over, gets an offer of actual money in exchange for the project rights. Is it reasonable to expect them to turn it down?

All the above is to say that, if you value OSS project quality and sustainability, a commercial sponsor (while not a panacea) can provide these qualities. There are some users who don't value these things, some who would rather use abandoned software without a single update for years instead of seeing the project tainted by the involvement of a for-profit entity and that is fine, but can the same be said of the rest of the user community?

I hope this does not come across as a lecture, I mean to merely share some stray thoughts on the subject. Having spent considerable time as a volunteer dev, I see things rather differently than I once did when I was a user (when I bothered to think about it at all). It is the proverbial glass half full/half empty, we as users can collectively strive for the unattainable ideal or lament the unavoidable shortcomings. I will concede that we should probably do both, with the hope that on balance, our contributions move things in the right direction.

Hard to disagree with Lorne's generalizations. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. When a corporation begins erecting hurdles to keep others from using or enhancing their "open source" software, then the landscape gets murkier. Some still do it right and, aside from the overall quality of the product, it's one of the main reasons we've moved on to XiVO. Others may not know the history or may not care, but pinning this all on the desire to avoid starvation is a little much considering the millions of dollars that have been tossed around.

I just wish XiVO had better integration for Cisco phones that support SIP. Like the 79xx version phones. But all they support is sccp.

lol

»pbs.twimg.com/media/CsvP ··· kyv6.jpg

I didn't have the time to do this yesterday, and I'm really not attempting to restart this discussion, but I didn't want to leave this hanging either. I think people have very different ideas of what constitutes usable documentation. There is documentation written for programmers and developers, and documentation written for end-users. Many Linux-based projects have no shortage of the former, but a real dearth of the latter. I understand that XiVO is intended for use in businesses and call centers, so making truly user-friendly documentation probably isn't their first priority.

But if by some odd chance the do want to expand their user base, what would be most useful to have is something along the lines of the old "Elastix Without Tears" or "PiaF without Tears" e-books. Basically a PDF document to get you going, that's written for end users.

Anyway I wanted to comment on each of the links AllThumbs posted:I'm not going to say much about this one, other than that a Google-translated page of possibly somewhat dated instructions in French doesn't seem the best approach to me, if only because Google might inadvertently translate some of the lines you are supposed to enter in to the computer. Better than nothing, but this wasn't something that concerned me that much anyway since installation instructions are pretty easy to find.This is one section in the middle of a page on the Nerd Vittles site. I have mixed feelings about this page. I like it because it's basically shows you how to configure things with little fluff, and it has plenty of screenshots, both of which are good. But, I think it would be better if each of the items had its own page (or section in an e-book), and if after the initial setup, the reasons that various configuration choices were made were explained a bit better, in a somewhat conversational tone. I was left feeling as though I could follow the examples shown, but still wouldn't completely understand what I was doing. But I'm not going to dwell on this page because it's actually not that bad. It does, however, assume you're installing "Incredible" PBX and not a plain-vanilla version of XiVO, which is a downside for someone like me who wants to avoid all the added junk in that distro.

Also, as a comment about XiVO, why do you need to create a user before you can create an extension? Extensions are not always associated with specific users! I'm nitpicking a bit I suppose, but this is one of the things that make it a little harder for FreePBX users to move to XiVO.From the same page, different section. Seems pretty straightforward, but again no real explanation of the various fields.Here it refers us to a section that shows trunk setup "recipes" for a few selected providers. Which is fine if you are using "Incredible" PBX and one of their associated providers, but there's no generic information on how to set up a SIP trunk. What if I wanted to create a SIP trunk to another Asterisk server? Nothing on these pages will be of much help.

Also, just looking at some of those "recipes", trunk setup seems quite a bit more complicated than in FreePBX. There are a great number of dropdowns and I suppose that for any given trunk setup most of them can be ignored, but nothing about this gives me any confidence that I could configure a SIP trunk to another Asterisk box, or to a provider not shown in the index.This is basically just another SIP trunk as far as XiVO is concerned.Again the problem here is the assumption you'll be using "Incredible" PBX, as expressed in step 3b:

3b. Enter Incredible PBX OAuth Client ID:

You can, of course, use your own OAuth Cliebt ID (RonR's instructions tell you how) and it would be nice if that were mentioned, but other than that minor nit this is one of the better pages of documentation in this bunch. Nothing said about IAX trunks, though.I already talked about this in an earlier post. I find it ridiculous that you have to set up multi-tenant to do something that can be easily done in FreePBX, using what Asterisk sometimes refers to as "ex-girlfriend logic". Why on earth XiVO would not support this I can't understand.

Then again, it may be that they do support it and don't know it. Several versions of FreePBX came out where this could be used, but no one knew about it. The Custom Contexts extension was in part written to solve this problem, if I remember correctly, even though it would have not been at all necessary to use something that complex if anyone had known about the other method.

This is something that begs for some documentation by somebody who can figure out the right way to do it. Using multi-tenant for this application is like trying to use an axe as a screwdriver - you might get it to work, but it will be frustrating as hell, and you might bleed a little in the process.Where to begin? The real problem is that XiVO doesn't have built-in IVR support, so here they make the case you don't need it. But to me this whole page is an example of why we need a source of documentation that is NOT Nerd Vittles. This thing is so intertwined with "Incredible" PBX that someone choosing to use a plain-vanilla version of XiVO is going to find it difficult to navigate.

It starts out by spending quite a bit of time trying to tear down the FreePBX approach to building an IVR, which would be fine if XiVO had something better. But it's only "better" if you think that writing your own dial plan is better. I don't, and I'm guessing more than a few other users wouldn't either. I don't know which is worse, that XiVO doesn't have an IVR page, or that the Nerd Vittles site spends so much of their "documentation" page tearing down the FreePBX way and defending XiVO. Anyway, this page is definitely not what I'd want to see in user-friendly documentation.And again we're at the Nerd Vittles site, looking at an index of articles. In this case there's a page on Setting Up Outbound Call Routes with XiVO, which again is basically a cookbook for use with three providers. But there is some introductory text, and it is very discouraging:

Some thought needs to go into your Outgoing Call Routing patterns once you have set up service with one or more Trunk providers to handle outbound calls. The general rule is that you must have a unique extension routing pattern for every outgoing call rule on your PBX. A single rule can be used to route calls to multiple providers, and XiVO will attempt to place the call to the Trunks in the order in which you have specified them. If you want callers to be able to choose the Outbound Trunk for every call that they place, then you’ll need a unique extension pattern for every provider. This is typically handled by XiVO using dialing prefixes. For example, 8NXXNXXXXXX might be used with Stripnum set to 1 to tell XiVO to send calls in this format to Vitelity after stripping off the first digit.

(emphasis added)

This is absolutely ridiculous, and is a prime example of why I get so disgusted with the Nerd Vittles way of doing things sometimes. In 2016 there is no reason your users should be dialing prefixes in front of their phone numbers. These are not old Ma Bell PBX's where you had to remember to dial 9 to get an outside line. I mean, I could see where dial prefixes might be useful in very specialized and unusual situations, but in a typical business setting you don't want employees dialing prefixes to select trunks, because sooner or later an employee is going to do it wrong, either because they are inattentive or because they are trying to disguise the origin of their calls.

If you are eagle-eyed you may have noticed that there are four tabs at the top of that outbound calls page, and now I wonder what's behind the other three. Wish I had known to look there when I had XiVO installed on my Raspberry Pi, because it wouldn't surprise me if you can do call routing the right way, although I suspect it would still be more complicated than in FreePBX. But again, this is a case where documentation from someone NOT associated with the Nerd Vittles site might be far more useful and revealing.And now we're sent to a forum page that in no way resembles documentation.This is XiVO's idea of documentation, and although it does show the feature it could stand to be fleshed out with some explanatory text. Looking at this page, my feeling is that this might be one feature that's actually easier to set up and use than in FreePBX, if only it were better explained or some more sample usage scenarios were shown. This may be what passes for documentation among developers, but a lot of times users need a little more hand-holding.And now we're back to that same Nerd Vittles page we saw earlier. What concerns me here is this:

Extensions in a Group can be set to ring simultaneously or in one of six round-robin configurations based upon factors such as previous call volume. Before you can create a ring group, you first have to enable a range of extensions to dedicate to Groups.

Two things: First, the configuration I find most useful in FreePBX is called "firstnotonphone", which basically means that if you have a list of extensions, a call will go to the first one that's not in use, and from that paragraph I can't be sure if XiVO has anything similar (admittedly I could probably find the answer to that in their very long PDF document, but I want to end this post sometime soon, and I'm only dealing with the docs that were posted). But the other thing is that apparently all your extensions in the group have to be in a specific number range; does that mean that you can't just create a new group and assign extensions to it that have non-contiguous numbers? If so, that seems a bit limiting. FreePBX doesn't care if the extensions in your ring groups are numbered contiguously or not, in fact you can even add outside phone numbers (such as your cell phone) to a FreePBX ring group. Sure, this arrangement might be perfect for call centers, but as I said, it's rather limiting.

Also my question about follow-me was ignored, so I'll assume there's no such feature in XiVO.Well, sure, but what I was really asking is if there was an equivalent to Misc Destinations in XiVO. Keep in mind, my goal is to avoid writing Asterisk dialplan by hand, to the greatest extent possible.This is a link to the PBX in a Flash forum, where there are posts about the manual way to manage a blacklist in XiVO. I'm not saying the FreePBX method is all that great, but at least there's a GUI page for adding and removing blacklist numbers. This is not exactly what I would call documentation.Which is to say, basically you have to write the dialplan yourself, or use something that's been posted online. So in this respect it's no better or worse than FreePBX, I suppose. I figured this would be too much to hope for.And if you're a programmer or developer, and have the patience to wade through it, you might even understand some of it.

My whole point, which seems to have been overlooked two or three times now, is that it would be great if XiVO had some coherent documentation written for end users that are NOT coders, developers, or Linux geeks. As I mentioned earlier, the "Without Tears" e-books came pretty close to this ideal for the FreePBX-based distros. Naturally every author will have their own style, and what I would consider good documentation might not be exactly what someone else would consider good documentation. But one of the reasons FreePBX got as popular as it did in the early days was that there was documentation out there that actually explained enough that a typical user could figure it out.

I also strongly feel that good documentation should be based on plain-vanilla XiVO. I sometimes grit my teeth when I see how things are done in the "Incredible" PBX package, and therefore I would REALLY prefer not to have to depend on their site, and their views on how things should be done. I'm not saying there's nothing useful there, particularly if you choose to use that software, but if you don't like their way of doing things then you should be able to find other sources of documentation.

Then again, if the intent of the XiVO developers is that their software should only be used by businesses and call centers that have IT specialists on staff, I can understand why their documentation reads the way it does. In that case I wish them well, but I probably won't ever be able to use their software. And maybe I'm not their intended audience, so that's fine. As the French would say, C'est la vie.

One thing I do NOT wish to do is (re)start a debate over whether the "Incredible" PBX way of doing things is good or bad. Everyone has an opinion, and they have plenty of users that apparently must be satisfied with what they're getting. I make no secret of the fact that I think they do some things the wrong way (like using prefix codes to select trunks) but if that doesn't bother someone else, great, we can each run our PBX's the way we want. My preference is to stay as far away as possible from their dialplans and (to a lesser extent) their documentation.

Your comments are pretty on. Even the FreePBX docs from Sangoma can be somewhat lacking. But honestly, as much as FreePBX has been adopted by hobbyist, the current intended market is not the home. It really is appliances and corporations.

Which really explain the dearth of solutions for GV. GV is not Enterprise ready. Google never intended it to be much more than a forwarding type service.

Gotta love sofa quarterbacks. If your way of doing things is superior, by all means crank up your blog again. We enjoyed reading it.

Your original suggestion was "What's really needed is a sort of a "Quick Start" guide for setting up XiVO that shows, in compact a form as possible and without extraneous fluff, how to set it up." You've cited PIAF Without Tears as an example. But that document was over 220 pages long.

I've tried to point you to documentation. You don't like it, and I get that. You are absolutely correct in noting that someone else could probably write something in a better way at least from your vantage point.

Perhaps you should take a crack at it once you invest $35 in a Raspberry Pi 3. Or, as I told you before, you can remove the "fluff" from any Incredible PBX for XiVO build by simply running the stand-alone installer in VirtualBox on your desktop or any non-RasPi platform and choosing the options you would like installed. Wouldn't cost you a dime.

Are you specifically saying that WhyADuck is MichiganTelephone?

@tm1000
This is not the first time that this doubt has been mentioned on this forum.

@AllThumbs
Do you know with certainty?

You know what they say about birds of a feather. I like Gerald and Gerald.

I've never had a blog. They are a huge waste of time. I know someone who had one, spent hours each day working on it, and could never get any kind of decent readership. Unless you are writing about reality TV or some other useless tripe, it's almost impossible to build a following for a blog. If you are speaking of the Michigan Telephone blog (because I remember you're tried to link me to that before), I only wish I could write as well as he did. I still use some of the dialplan he published on his blog, and he did usually explain things in a way I could understand. But as I recall, he got very upset with the direction FreePBX was taking, and his posts about them took on a decidedly bitter tone. I think that's why he decided to shut down the blog, going solely by my very imperfect memory.I'm not saying those books were perfect, and I may have done a poor job of explaining what I would consider a good book on the subject. In my opinion, a good book (or web site or whatever) would show lots of actual examples, with screenshots, which admittedly you already do on some of your pages. But a good book would go beyond that to explain the various configuration options, particularly the ones that are most likely to be used. It would not just be a "cookbook" that shows you how to do specific things, but never explains the reasons behind particular configuration choices. And it would not be slanted toward a particular distro, nor a particular platform (for example it would not push virtual machines). Really I'm thinking something of a cross between the old "without tears" books and the old voip-info.org wiki, back in the days when it was actually kept fairly up to date. I still feel like I'm doing a poor job of explaining this, but it's the best I can do.

So let's say you have a chapter on setting up an extension. You lead off with your "quick start" example, showing with screenshots and text how to set up your first extension, and how to overcome common problems (if there are any known ones). That's the first part of your chapter. But then you go on to discuss the other options, and maybe give examples of situations in which they might be used. I realize there is a tradeoff here, you don't want to create the "Encyclopedia VoIPiana" but basically you want to have enough detail so when someone runs into a common problem situations they can overcome them.

220 pages actually isn't a bad length if it's all solid information and examples, particularly if a lot of screenshots are included. Screenshots can bring up a page count fast!It amazes me that you keep ignoring the point I'm trying to make. What you are pointing me to is not documentation, except in the very loosest sense. You're having me jump to various web pages, some of which are slanted toward your build and some of which are nothing more than forum posts. I understand that what you're pointing me to is far better than nothing; all I've ever really tried to say is that it's not sufficient to make this understandable to me, and maybe not to others who aren't developers or coders.

If your GUI is really good, then your documentation can suck and new users will still be able to figure it out. Conversely, if your GUI kind of sucks but your documentation explains everything very clearly, in a natural language way that users can understand (in other words, NOT written by developers or coders), then new users still can figure it out. But if both your GUI and your documentation are weak, you're going to have a hard time attracting new users that don't have the mindset of a developer or coder.The only options I've seen that "wouldn't cost you a dime" still require you to provide a credit card, and as I have told you before I don't have one (I do not wish to go into the reasons for that, please just accept that I don't have one, because it's the truth). Further, every such option you've mentioned recently has a time limit, after which it becomes no longer free (and if they have credit card info, they can start billing you). In the past you did mention an option that offered "lifetime" servers for a fixed rate, but nobody really seemed to think much of that service as far as I could tell (for example, reports of VM's just disappearing, forcing you to start over and rebuild the entire thing).

If I thought for a minute I could figure out XiVO enough to truly make it work for me, I'd at least put RonR's build on my Raspberry Pi 2 and start there (which is what I already tried). But I just found it to be too different from FreePBX, and there are too many places where you still have to write your own dialplan (or use someone else's) rather than do things from within the GUI. While in some cases you provide dialplan on your site, again in many cases it's slanted toward your way of doing things, which is not necessarily the way I'd want to do them.

But let's say that some way, somehow, I could figure it all out. That still wouldn't help anyone else in my shoes, because I am not a good writer. I could not write the type of documentation I'd want to read; I'd be far too inclined to get lost and wander off into tangents that have nothing to do with the subject matter. Not many people have a real talent for clear writing, unfortunately. Look at my posts here, I'm not particularly proud of some of them because I know they are too verbose, but I just don't know how to pare them down effectively.

Part of what I've been trying to say all along is we have a chicken/egg situation here. Unless someone can write some really good, USER-friendly documentation for XiVO, new users are going to have a very difficult time with it. But if the potential documentation writer can't figure it out to start with, then that documentation will never get written. And THEN we have the whole side issue of whether XiVO is really even intended for use by home and small office users. If they are only going after the big fish, then maybe it's an exercise in futility for someone like me to try making it work. This is the same problem I had with FusionPBX; they don't seem to be much interested in users that can't afford to pay $$$ to attend their training seminars so they don't have any really user-friendly documentation (unless that has changed recently; I haven't looked in several months). For all the bad things you can say about FreePBX now, at least they started out as a project named "Asterisk@Home" and at one time welcomed us "small fish" users.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from using XiVO; as I have said on several occasions, I would like to see them develop into a viable alternative to FreePBX. I just don't think they are quite there yet. The time may come, and it may be soon, when XiVO is better than FreePBX, but again I just don't think they quite have it nailed. And I think in a way you do them a disservice by suggesting that writing your own dialplans (for something like an IVR) is better than a GUI-based alternative. You can believe that if you want, but many users are not going to see it that way, and IMHO the XiVO developers should never accept the idea that not having an IVR page is "good enough." It's little things like that which will keep users from migrating from FreePBX to XiVO. Assuming they care about attracting former FreePBX users, that is.

Shocker: Our documentation is slanted toward our turnkey installation and our way of doing things. What else would anyone (except you perhaps) expect??

no your documentation is slanted towards experts who think like you do. its about as far from turnkey as you can get. i have raised this before and you just dont get it.
dock i suggest you dedicate a vm to elastix 2.5.0 and just give up on allthumbs / incredibly annoying pbxes.

Aaaaargh... and that's EXACTLY why it's not an example of documentation for a plain-vanilla XiVO installation.

I don't expect YOUR documentation to be slanted toward anything other than YOUR build, but that means it's "Incredible PBX" documentation, NOT generic XiVO documentation. You keep trying to prove that's what I was asking for, when clearly it wasn't.

I have no idea why you want to keep beating this dead horse until it's shredded and bloody. Leave it to the vultures already, for crying out loud.

VirtualBox is not going to cost you anything or require a credit card. Load that on your desktop and then you can use the full install of whatever system you want, including Ward's that let's you pick and choose.

While the RPi is a great little box, it is not mainstream. And will never really be for PBX writers.

You're confusing two different issues that somehow got tangled together in this thread. One is that I don't want the "Incredible" addons and running in a virtual machine would solve that, although personally I wouldn't want my PBX running on my desktop system, but that's beside the point. The other problem is the difficulty level of XiVO, and that's going to be the same no matter how I run it. If just getting rid of the "Incredible" stuff was the only issue, I could run RonR's build on my Raspberry Pi 2 and be happy. But I could be running it on the most powerful Linux box in the world, and it's not going to make it any more usable or user-friendly.

I would be curious to know how many people in this forum are currently using XiVO as your main PBX? I don't mean you downloaded to a VM and are playing around with it, or that you run a couple extensions though it and then connect it to another Asterisk box that still serves as your main PBX. I mean that you have actually installed and are using XiVO (whether the "Incredible" build or a more plain-vanilla install) as a primary PBX that handles all the traffic for your home or business. And if you have done that, I'd be interested to know whether you have any background in coding, software development, or if you consider yourself an advanced Linux user, and how difficult you've found it to configure XiVO the way you want. And also, did you receive any kind of formal training in XiVO, or did you do it strictly using online documentation?

In other words, am I the only dummy here that's having problems understanding this, or are a fair percentage of those who try XiVO (particularly those that aren't advanced Linux geeks or coders) just "kicking the tires" but never really going any further?

Since you've mentioned Elastix 2.5.0, can you tell me what version of Asterisk and what version of FreePBX they are including, and if those are older versions, is there any way to upgrade either of those without "breaking" Elastix? Just curious at this point.

Xivo is hard, no 2 ways around that. It is clear that their audience is not the casual hobbyist. I downloaded it and played with it. Not all that user friendly. A bit too young of an interface for me to trust in production. Have you looked at Ombutel?