New Manage Organization Permission

The 1stream admin panel has historically allowed for reducing user permissions, however any access to the admin panel meant that users could modify other users or potentially themselves, meaning you couldn't easily provide Report-Only access to the portal.

There is now a new Manage Organization permission, and the former Admin Access permission has been renamed to Access 1stream Portal to make it clearer what it allows for.

All groups that previously had Admin Access set to yes have had the new permission defaulted to yes as well, but going forward you can adjust these permissions separately to grant the minimum access a user needs.

Order Form Simplification

For our direct partners, we've updated all of our support portal forms to make it more clear what exactly we need for each request, and we've reduced the number of forms to make it easier to pick what you're actually looking for.

Quality of Life/Bug Fixes

• We've fleshed out the Kaseya Voicemail to Ticket routine, so you can now set that up yourselves and use multiple mailboxes like with other PSA platforms.

• We've fixed the Extension > General > Webclient Password explanation box popping over to the right, it now pops out to the left so it can be properly read.

• In reviewing the above issue, we found a few other popovers that did not align properly, those have been corrected.
• The System > Single Sign-On menu has been corrected so that it properly shows the SSO users that are enabled for each system when viewed.

FFotW: Ticket Form Snapshots

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Users of 1stream Core or higher are probably used to editing and submitting tickets on the regular, but did you know you can control the defaults for those ticket windows?

You can setup Ticket Form Snapshots which can then be applied manually by users to set certain fields to a common standard, and you can even set individual snapshots as the Add New Default and Edit Default. That way when a user opens up a new ticket, you can default Include Time to be unchecked, or checked if you prefer.

You can find more detail on this feature in our Knowledgebase Article.

Pricing Calculator

While you've been able to generate simple quotes in the portal or via a distribution partner for a while now, it hasn't been the easiest especially to compare and contrast pricing.

We've finally built out a full Customer Calculator which will help you determine whether the customer fits best under Per Channel or Per User pricing models. There's also a Simple Internal Use Calculator and Simple Customer Calculator which reduces the input necessary but doesn't provide the cost comparison between the two license models.

You'll find these workbooks under the Partner > Resources menu in your admin portal under the Pricing Details and Calculators subsection, currently available in USD and AUD, and we'll add more currency options soon.

Priority Routing DID Mapping

You have always been able to configure the Routing No Match DN field to handle all calls that the system doesn't have an alternate path for, but you can also adjust things based on the incoming DID.

This allows you to say that calls to your main number failover to one queue, while calls to your customer-specific number go to that customer's specific queue. The main Contact Priority Routing list is the one that takes effect first, and on that...

Priority Routing Re-Order

We've updated the order of Priority Routing so that it makes a bit more sense for users who are using all four levels of this.

It will now use the following prioritization order to the strategies:

1. If a specific Contact is listed, it will use that
2. Otherwise, if their Title is listed, it will use that path
3. Thirdly it checks for their Company in the list, and uses that path if it exists
4. Finally, it checks for the Territory attached to the caller ID
5. If no results are found it will use the above routing table
6. Finally, it will use the Routing No Match DN set at the top of 1stream settings.

GetActiveCalls Endpoint

We've added a new GetActiveCalls endpoint which can be called by anyone with a 1stream Core license or higher.

This will provide the same detail as the GetCallLogs endpoint, just for any active call currently ongoing in the system.

Advanced Bulk Edit

In some situations, it may be necessary to bulk edit the Enable Web Client option, or the Outbound Caller ID. Due to the way these fields operate they can't be stored under the same menu as the rest, so we've added a new menu to Bulk Management, Advanced Bulk Edit.

With this you can update fields that require iterating over all extensions, and it will just take a bit longer to process than your average change.

You can double check which extensions this will impact using the blue button at the top before you apply the changes.

QoL and Bug Fixes

• The Bulk Management > Import Users menu has been updated to allow you to Try reimporting ignoring errors whenever an error occurs. This will ingest the non-erroring users, while skipping over the highlighted line numbers.

• We've updated the Shop > Orders Status page to make it clearer when one of our distribution partners creates an order using their API connection.
• A number of minor display issues were corrected in the Australian MTP site, which should reduce confusion around the domains.
• The same Orders Status page has been updated to include a user count for the order, so you can see what exactly what was purchased. Channel-based systems report as 0 users, but you can click in to view the purchased channel count.
• A bug in the Extensions > Devices menu was corrected which caused some systems to report that they did not exist in the MPP backend portal.
• The Roles & Rights created within the Systems menu of the portal has been updated to no longer limit the max number of systems to 32. You can now have unlimited systems attached to each individual role.
• Additional catches have been enabled to find duplicate extensions in the Bulk Management > Import Users process, preventing import errors.
• We've added additional detail to the WEBSITE ACCESS ISSUES error page to provide more information on what ports you need to allow to ensure proper access to our pages.
• The main login page has been adjusted to redirect typos to /sso/webclient instead of the admin /sign-in endpoint, which should allow users to more easily login to the webclient when they make a mistake.
• We've corrected a bug in the Set Operator Extension button where it would successfully set the operator, but then error due to an invalid permission option.

Control User Import/Export

You can now more easily add additional admin users to the system, or download a list of all extensions across all phone systems with two clicks!

Under System > Users on the left-hand side you'll find the new Export Users, Import Users, and Downloads menus available.

Within the Downloads menu you'll find the Sample CSV mentioned above as well as the PBX and Users Ids sheet which lists all phone systems and all of their extensions.

You can then use these ID values to import non-SSO users for binding to an extension in a phone system. Otherwise you can leave those fields blank if you're just importing your admin users.

Title Based Routing

Available to 1stream Engage or higher licensed companies

We were already caching the title of contacts for the Marked Titles feature (FFoTW for 4/26/24) so we figured we may as well leverage that as an option for the Priority Call Routing feature as well.

In addition to the previous Company/Account, Contact, and Territory (CW Only) methods, you can now enter in a string which is searched in the title of the user from the PSA/CRM/ERP

Try it out today if you have the Engage licensing or reach out to your sales manager if you don't for pricing information.

Canadian Calling Plans Now Available!

We're happy to announce a new partnership with IXICA in Canada for a bvoip calling plan option. We now offer competitive calling plans in country, billed in Canadian Dollars, with SMS options available as well.

Reach out to your sales manager or sales@bvoip.com for more information on this if you'd like to know more.

(FFotW) Bridging and its new UI

Forgotten Feature of the Week

A Bridge allows for two separate systems to call internally to each other, using internal extensions, and without clogging your SIP Trunk channels or minutes.

We've updated the SIP Trunks menu to now properly have the user interface for controlling the Bridges that can be made between systems.

This can drastically reduce latency time for global deployments and streamline operations between sister companies that need to call each other. There are some caveats though such as needing to run reports and setup integrations in each system individually, so this isn't right for everyone.

Reach out to our partners@bvoip.com team if you think a Bridged system might be best for you or your customer and we can discuss the pros and cons.

QoL Bug Fixes

• We've simplified the User profile tab under the System > Users menu to remove unnecessary fields, streamlining the user creation process.
• We've decluttered the Partners > Resources menu so the key things are easier to locate.
• We've added Voicemail to Ticket for Kaseya BMS, to reach feature parity with other major PSAs.
• We've resolved a bug with the Extensions > Devices menu where it would sometimes return an Internal Server Error. This error should no longer appear, and the integration with the remote provisioning system has been streamlined to speed up the process a bit.

• The consistency of error highlighting has been improved, to make it clearer when issues arise.
• We've added coverage for additional errors to better show what issue is actually happening if it's something that is user correctable.
• The auto-correcting system recovery page will no longer infinitely loop. It will attempt to perform corrective measures up to five times before visibly erroring.
• We've removed the legacy Secondary App from the admin portal welcome emails, and we've corrected the link to point at the company-specific portal instead of the generic MTP address.

Australian MTP/1stream Breakout

We've broken out the 1stream and MTP portals for the Australian region, so those can now be accessed at the dedicated links below.

This will smooth out the performance for our Australian partners, while ensuring cross-region support for managing phone systems for your customer across the globe.

•  https://au-mtp.bvoip.net 
•  https://portal-au.1stream.com 

The final migration component of this was completed this week. You received an email titled "AU Portal Move" from our team with additional details on your direct changes if you were impacted.

Email Provider Replacement

We are working to migrate from our old email provider to Amazon SES which we expect to permanently resolve issues we've seen in past months where our former provider had messages towards Microsoft 365 delayed for upwards of 4-6 hours.

We still recommend customers of Microsoft 365 configure their own email server, as that provides the best sending speed via the Graph API, but the new sending solution results in vastly reduced delivery speeds.

This is split across multiple endpoints around the world, so you will only be impacted if your localized datacenter has an outage (and we don't use us-east-1).

Your server was automatically migrated if you were set to use our previous mail provider, and you shouldn't need to adjust any rules to ensure delivery unless you have server-bound rulesets.

Knowledge Base Re-categorization

We've recategorized our knowledge base to better line up with the 11 products under the 1stream umbrella. All the same documents are still there, you just might need to take a different path to reach them.

If you see any issues or have any feedback, you can leave it right on the article by highlighting some text and clicking the + plus button that appears.

As a very minor change, we also reduced a large amount of the vertical whitespace, to reduce the amount you need to scroll on each page.

Quality of Life Fixes

• We've added the Extension Name and Extension Number columns to the Queue Calls that Waited report so you can see who answered long holding calls.
• We've updated our Closed filter for ConnectWise to exclude statuses that start with Closed-Pending, allowing those statuses to still be treated as open for things like Ticket Based Routing or browsing tickets in the 1stream Client.
• A CSV export has been added to the Holidays table.

FFotW: Workforce Management

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Companies with a 1stream Enterprise license can leverage the Workforce Management features to perform scheduling and forecasting on call volume, to ensure your call center is always staffed to meet demand based on historical volume.

We're working on publishing additional material for this, but we've got some existing docs on this in our knowledgebase as well. Find more detail below!

 1stream Workforce Management 

In case you missed it!

If you haven't checked the "What's New" tab since the last banner announcement, the following changes have occurred:

•  HyperNetwork and Partner Connect 
•  Bug Fixes and Documentation 

Integrated SMS Release

Available to all 1stream Core and above users.

We're happy to announce the public release of our new Integrated SMS feature, which allows you to connect a compatible trunking provider to 1stream so that inbound messages can be made into tickets, and outbound PIN Codes can be sent using your own number instead of the generic 1stream one.

This also supports inbound and outbound MMS messages with images, so you can easily communicate images with clients in low service areas where a live camera won't work.

These images get attached to the ticket in addition to showing inside the thread

Check out our new documentation section below for additional details on how to get this configured, or reach out to our partners@bvoip.com email address, and we can work with you to get this setup.

 1stream Integrated SMS Setup Docs  

Quality of Life Changes

• We've added a new SMS Receive Email on New option to 1stream user profiles, which will send a single email with the contents of the message on any new message that user receives.

• SyncroMSP notes will now properly submit an email alongside the entry, to match the behavior that appears in the Syncro system itself.
• We've added a new Refresh Prompts button to the Manage Organization page so you can refresh the Dial by Name greetings without support involvement.

Bug Fixes

• We've resolved an edge case issue where the main management console of a PBX would become unavailable, with the error "Error loading PBX token". In the event this occurs again, auto recovery has been added to ensure the console is available again within seconds.
• Additional filtering has been added to the new system order form to reduce the chance of a malformed FQDN error.
• A catch has been added for malformed FQDNs notifying you that we'll need to reinstall the system to correct the error.

FFotW: High Availability/Fallback

Forgotten Feature of the Week

For customers who need the highest levels of uptime, we offer full High Availability in which we setup a spare server which takes over in the event of an outage on the primary server, with downtime as low as 90 seconds before you can start making calls again in the softphone.

You can find more information on this in our High Availability Feature article of our knowledgebase, and current partners can find the SLA details under Partners > Resources > High Availability Accounts in the MTP admin panel.

HyperNetwork is LIVE for SIPTrunk.com partners

Announced at our Partner Connect event earlier this year, the patented HyperNetwork technology by the team over at SIPTrunk.com and BCM One allows your number to automatically failover to a backup carrier in the event of a catastrophic outage at the carrier level.

This is perfect for schools, hospitals, and call centers where inbound calls are critical, and a provider-level outage could cause thousands in lost revenue, productivity, or worse.

While this is available to all SIPTrunk.com partners for a $99/month charge, we're pleased to announce this will be available FOR FREE to ALL bvoip partners that utilize SIPTrunk.com in the United States.

We'll have more detail to follow in the coming weeks, including exactly which numbers of yours and your customers are eligible, and which are already enabled.

Partners who attend our upcoming event in Denver will get a sneak peak and can get a list of their enabled numbers at the event.

Partner Connect Denver

We have our next Partner Connect coming up in just under a month, on the 23rd and 24th of September at the Hyatt Regency, Aurora-Denver Conference Center.

While many other vendor events focus on selling to you, this event is focused primarily on how you can sell better to your end customers, and how bvoip can better support you in doing so. You'll get the chance to meet with other bvoip partners, learn how they provide rockstar service and get good profitability at the end of the month, and find out more about new features and options coming to the bvoip ecosystem.

There is no cost to join these events, but you must plan your travel to get there!

We hope to see you there and learn more about how we can strengthen our partnership and make bvoip work better for you!

 Register Here!! 

This is immediately followed by the MSP Community Minds event in the same hotel and conference center on September 25th and 26th.

Quality of Life Changes

• We've added a new field to the user profile menu, Messaging Only View, which when set to Yes will force all 1stream windows to only show the Messaging menu. You can also set this to Teams to make it only affect the Teams app.
• You can append ?SMSOnly=True to the end of the client URL for 1stream, and it will load just the Messaging window, if you don't want to use the above setting to permanently change it for a user.
• We've updated the UI for Paging Groups, so it won't allow you to save unless you have configured a Paging dial code properly.

Bug Fixes

• We corrected the Catch All Company selection for ConnectWise so it is always used as the first option, correcting an issue where a contact with multiple company matches would use the legacy routine of searching "Catchall" and picking the first result.
• The validation code for creating or copying extensions has been corrected to ensure that the email address is unique and a license is selected in all scenarios.

FFotW: Progressive Dialer

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Companies with a sales, or other team doing regular outbound dials against a list of numbers or contacts should take a look at our Progressive Dialer option which allows you to save a ton of time in dialing out, and keep track of your progress while you do so.

Only your dialer users need this license, not everyone, so worth taking a look at as a possible option to speed along your calling process.

Bug Fixes

We're still working on some key features that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks, but these past few weeks have been focused on crushing bugs.

• We restructured some code to improve page loading times in some areas of the Control portal.
• Corrected a bug in the Transcription functionality, so it properly pushes the call transcription to the ticket along with the recording. If you haven't already configured transcription services, check out our article on the Call Transcription Integration.
• Fixed a bug in the Screen Pop routine which would cause a duplicate screen pop to occur in some cases, this should only happen once now.

• The Inbound Rules menu object expiration trigger would sometimes occur much faster than expected, making it difficult to save changes. This has been fixed.

• If you setup an SBC, the status mistakenly showed as a red circle, despite being good and actually connected properly. This should show green now.

• The Groups menu was not allowing partners to add new users or save the group properly.
• Corrected a few bugs with SIPTrunk.com in the SMS Beta, so message threads should no longer be split into inbound/outbound conversations in some cases.

Recent KB Articles

We've been making a lot of documentation lately, and here are some of the highlights.

• If you've got a user who sees the [100] Unable to open connection error with SSO, see our article Microsoft SSO Error Troubleshooting on how to self-fix that.

• We've got a new article covering how to Send a SIPTrunk.com SMS using the Call Flow Designer, which you can leverage for items like missed call notifications, or sending business hours via text message from your IVR.

• We just released the article Utilizing Built-In Teams Queues, which walks you through how to setup a forwarding rule which routes to a call queue or other resource account created in the Teams Admin Center

• Our article Determining SMS Methods to Use only listed out a basic outline of what each SMS method could do, but we've rewritten that into a simple flow chart with the various partner providers, so you know immediately what methods are available to you and your customers.
• We've also added a new article SMS Methods for Microsoft Teams which specifically covers the methods available when you're trying to work entirely out of Teams
• There's a new article clarifying the E911 Requirements for Canada, as there are potential fines involved if you misconfigure your E911 registration and someone dials emergency services.
• We rewrote the article How to Create Conference Calls to document another method for users to easily transfer additional parties into their personal conference bridge.

Beta: PSA-Integrated SMS

We're wrapping up initial development of the new SMS capabilities, allowing your conversations to be ingested into a PSA/CRM ticket, and we're looking for some beta testers who would be interested in trying this.

If your company already has an SMS-enabled number through Flowroute, SIPTrunk.com, Twilio, Telnyx, or ThinQ, and you'd like to participate in providing feedback on this feature, please send an email to partners@bvoip.com with what PSA you use, and what provider you have an SMS enabled number through, and we'll schedule a time to get that setup with you.

Beta: New UI Menus

As mentioned last week we have the beta of the new UI menus available using the New UI button that you'll find on the top right of many phone system pages.

See more detail on this in the previous post, Nested Microsoft 365 SSO and Beta UI.

FFotW: User status Auto Switch

Forgotten Feature of the Week

The vast majority of users have a set schedule that they work every week, so the Auto Switch function allows your users to configure their hours of availability, so they automatically get moved to Do Not Disturb outside of their defined hours.

This can follow the global office hours, or be set custom at the user level, and it also supports defined break times. Each user configures this themselves inside the webclient settings.

You can find more detail about this in our Auto Switch Feature article.

In case you missed it!

If you haven't checked the "What's New" tab since the last banner announcement, the following changes have occurred:

•  MFA "Invalid Code" Fix, 1stream Region Selection 
•  1stream Speed Improvements and New Device Templates 

Nested Microsoft 365 SSO

You can now activate Microsoft 365 SSO properly for your nested phone systems at the same partner portal level, whereas previously this was only available when nesting the entire customer.

See the articles below to set this up, then your end users just visit https://<partnerdomain>/sso/webclient and click the Microsoft 365 button.

•  Activate Partner Level Microsoft 365 SSO 
•  Activate Phone System Microsoft 365 SSO 

We'll be releasing Google SSO via these new menus in the coming weeks, and that will be announced here as well.

Beta: New UI Menus

We've now published the new interfaces which we've been teasing over the last few months, and those can now be accessed using the New UI switch in the top right. You'll find these on many menus, including Extensions, Outbound Rules, Ring Groups, and Call Queues.

Once enabled, a yellow disclaimer banner will appear across the top of the page to make it clear this is a beta page.

Should you run into any issues and feel the need to switch back, you can find the Old UI option in the same place where you switched to the New UI above.

You can provide feedback and bug reports either via the Ideas menu at the top of this announcement, or by emailing support@bvoip.com

Beta: PSA-Integrated SMS

We're wrapping up initial development of the new SMS capabilities, allowing your conversations to be ingested into a PSA/CRM ticket, and we're looking for some beta testers who would be interested in trying this.

If your company already has an SMS-enabled number through Flowroute, SIPTrunk.com, Twilio, Telnyx, or ThinQ, and you'd like to participate in providing feedback on this feature, please send an email to partners@bvoip.com with your company name, what PSA you use, and what provider you have an SMS enabled number through, and we'll schedule a time to get that setup with you.

MFA "Invalid Code" Fix

Back in May we had reported that we had resolved the issues with the MFA entry occasionally returning the error "Invalid MFA Code" despite the code being correct. While we had corrected part of the problem back then, some users have still seen the invalid code error since.

We've corrected the MFA code entry so that the error should no longer appear again, and we've performed rigorous testing with no errors since that change was made.

1stream Region Selection

We recently added the Region Selection menu to the 1stream chrome extension, which will allow you to pick between the region you're using for 1stream.

We are beta testing the APAC region at this time, and we expect to have that and the European 1stream region available in the coming weeks.

Dashboard Improvements/QOL Fixes

We've previously talked about an entirely new dashboard, however due to delays in various parts of that we're backporting many of the improvements to the current Control portal.

We plan to revisit the full redesign after the v20 patch later this year.

• The Due Date field for AutoTask is no longer always required, it will automatically fill that in when possible if you have the "Use Default Due Date" turned on in the AutoTask integration options.
• The Inbound Rules menu now has an Import option available to speed up rule creation.
• The CatchAll Company selection was not being followed properly in some ConnectWise cases. That has been corrected, and if you use the Voicemail to Ticket feature it's crucial you have a CatchAll Company set to ensure it works consistently, no matter your PSA.

Beta: PSA-Integrated SMS

We're wrapping up initial development of the new SMS capabilities, allowing your conversations to be ingested into a PSA/CRM ticket, and we're looking for some beta testers who would be interested in trying this.

If your company already has an SMS-enabled number through Flowroute, SIPTrunk.com, Twilio, Telnyx, or ThinQ, and you'd like to participate in providing feedback on this feature, please send an email to partners@bvoip.com with your company name, what PSA you use, and what provider you have an SMS enabled number through, and we'll schedule a time to get that setup with you.

FFotW: SFTP Synchronizer

Forgotten Feature of the Week

The SFTP Synchronizer can be found under the Tools menu of any phone system, and it allows you to copy or move your recordings and voicemails off the server to a secondary storage for backup or long term retention.

A common use case is to setup a simple virtual machine or container running an SFTP service, which then has a mounted cloud storage endpoint with long term retention and low write cost, such as Amazon Glacier or Azure Cold storage.

If you need long retention but also high read/access rates, where cold storage isn't as cost effective, we recommend leveraging cheap refurbished storage in a RAID array at a physical location, with a secondary backup copy stored offsite.

1stream Speed Improvement

We've finally ironed out the inefficient code of the 1stream Manage Organization page, and you can now access that menu faster than ever before. While previously it could take tens of seconds to load the page due to the volume of information, we've streamlined the loading behavior to make sure the page loads consistently in less than 5 seconds.

New Device Templates (240711)

We now have templates built out for the following device models. All new servers going forward will immediately have these templates available, and we are working to install these into existing instances.

Fanvil

• X301G, X301P, X301W, X303P, X303W, X303G, X305
• V62, V63, V64, V65, V67

Polycom

• Edge 100, 220, 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, 550

• B10, B20, B30
• CCX350, CCX400, CCX500, CCX505, CCX600, CCX700

Snom

• D140, D150
• D713, D787
• D815, D812, D862, D865

Yealink

• T20P, T22P, T27P, T28P
• T31W, T34W
• T41G, T42G, T44U, T44W, T46G, T48G, T49G
• T56A, T58A, T58V, T58W

If you urgently need these templates, you can reach out to our support team to have them installed, otherwise they will become available to all systems over the next few weeks.

Document: Polycom OBi to UCS Conversion

Up until now, the OBi line of Polycom VVX X50 devices has been heavily restricted and only operatable on certain supported cloud providers.

Thanks to the help of one of our partners, we were able to find a path for customers to migrate their Polycom OBi devices to the UCS firmware, at least in the case where the phone was initially on UCS to begin with. This may not work for devices purchased as OBi edition devices, but we believe that it should.

Very much an "At your own risk" sort of process, as these devices were not meant to be converted between the firmware versions.

 Convert Poly OBi Edition to UCS Edition 

• WARNING: Neither HP/Poly nor bvoip support this process in any way, so perform the conversion at your own risk, or sell the devices and buy UCS Edition version instead for the safest path forward.

Beta: PSA-Integrated SMS

We're wrapping up initial development of the new SMS capabilities, allowing your conversations to be ingested into a PSA/CRM ticket, and we're looking for some beta testers who would be interested in trying this.

If your company already has an SMS-enabled number through Flowroute, SIPTrunk.com, Twilio, Telnyx, or ThinQ, and you'd like to participate in providing feedback on this feature, please send an email to partners@bvoip.com with your company name, what PSA you use, and what provider you have an SMS enabled number through, and we'll schedule a time to get that setup with you.

FFotW: Power BI Reporting Integration

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Released earlier this year, we want to ensure all our 1stream Core users are aware of the availability of the Power BI Desktop Template which allows for you to quickly get your call data in an interactive report, with multiple pre-built visuals that may help you think up some additional tenant-specific metrics. Simply download the template, grab an API key, and you're off!

For large enterprises we also have the Power BI Premium/Fabric Capacity Integration which allows for constant refreshes and more of a centralized dashboard like functionality. This does come at a hefty cost for the platform, so we only recommend it for the larger companies that need that level of data access or who already have a Capacity with spare units.