Preparing for the Next Core Platform Release

Since August 1st, our development teams have been working around the clock to prepare for the next core communications platform version release. Our analogy is this something similar to a Windows 10 to a Windows 11 upgrade/migration.

As part of this, an actual account-by-account migration will need to take place in between today December 5th, 2024 and March 1, 2025. Our goal as part of this project to is make sure all work would be done outside of normal peak business hours for all partners and their downstream customers, likely nights and weekends.

We worked to make this process as automated and seamless as possible to include the ability to maintain desktop and mobile apps, physical device provisioning, and call flow. Meaning, little to no work would need to be done by our existing partners as part of this process.

There are some things that surely will change after the fact in some areas like system configuration and call flow. We are preparing a guide on the changes that you need to know post migration.

We understand that a lot of work needs to be done in a short period of time, and we will be doing our best to proactively post maintenance windows ahead of time and notify accounts on when they will be scheduled for migration.

Stay tuned here or on our Blog for more details.

You may have missed these:

If you're not reading our announcement posts unless the banner appears, you may have missed the following news posts:

•  GlassHive Marketing, New Number Request Improvements, QoL Changes 
•  Reports-Only 1stream Permissions and Simpler Order Forms 
•  Pricing Calculator, Priority Routing Updates, QoL Changes 
•  Admin/Non-SSO User Import, Title Based Routing, CA Calling Plans 

Progressive Web App Deployment for Windows

We've got a new script available under the Partners > Resources > Automation and APIs section which enables you to quickly deploy the soft phone as a Progressive Web App to your end users using the Windows operating system and a Chromium-based browser such as Edge or Chrome.

Simply follow our knowledgebase article Deploy the Progressive Web App (PWA) using the script shown below, and you'll have the app deployed to your team in no time.

FFotW: Alternative Routing for Outage Scenarios

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Whether or not you're using High Availability for your systems, you should always have a backup phone number configured for every number you own. This way in the event of a phone system outage or general trunk registration issue, you're able to still receive calls to an alternate destination like a backup cell number.

For our US-based SIPTrunk.com partners, this can be configured within your SIPTrunk.com portal to allow for either a backup phone number OR a voicemail to email mailbox which will only be presented when the call cannot get through to your system.

You can find more details on this in our knowledgebase article Adding Alternative Routing to SIPTrunk.com Trunks.

For our partners who purchase calling plans through bvoip, simply submit a new support ticket to us within the support portal using the category shown below.

If you are using an external/third party trunking partner, refer to their documentation on how to best configure this.

bvoip + GlassHive

We are thrilled to announce a new partnership program with GlassHive that we believe will bring a new experience for bvoip partners.

bvoip partners can now access a complimentary GlassHive account along with three months’ worth of co-branded Assets that will help to empower your marketing and sales strategy. GlassHive offers a variety of marketing materials designed to help you effectively promote bvoip products and services to your clients.

Key Benefits of this Partnership Program:

• Free GlassHive Account: Access all the powerful features of GlassHive to streamline your marketing efforts.
• Co-Branded bvoip Content: Utilize professionally crafted content to enhance your marketing strategies.
• Dedicated Account Manager: Receive personalized support to ensure seamless setup and execution of your campaigns

To apply for access, please navigate to the bvoip control portal, partners, resources, GlassHive Marketing Program

New Number Request (Non-US Partners Only)

We've updated the form in the support portal for New Number Request to now include specifics on what forms of verification we need to proceed with a number order.

Once you pick your country and enter in the server and quantity of numbers, you'll then be presented a country-specific page to fill out further details on.

Quality of Life Changes and Bugfixes

• We've added a new Delete/X button to the top of the System > Users menu, which now allows you to mass delete users from the list to enable easier cleanup for older users.
• We've hidden the Shop > Quotations menu pending further development to flesh out the payment processing system. You can find a pricing calculator under Partners > Resources or get quotes via your distribution partner or account manager.

• For the Progressive Dialer, we've clarified the documentation to include the replacement variables that can be used in the follow up email action.

• The ConnectWise PSA integration has been updated to include the status name "Completed" when considering whether a ticket is completed. This is specifically used for the Include Completed checkbox that shows on the ticket list, hopefully cleaning that up a bit more than before.

• The logic for Include Completed has also been updated to use the Closed flag in ConnectWise instead of just the text "Closed", so it should properly hide tickets that are closed but with a differing status name such as "Cancelled".

• A number of issues were corrected where you would see 404 and 403 errors upon accessing certain UI elements. Should you see any further issues like this, please report it via a support ticket.
• We corrected an error with the noreply@1stream.com emails, where it was incorrectly sending out using the wrong authentication. You may have received a few "Unverified" emails during this period, those should be resolved.
• A small number of emails were still being sent out via our previous mail queueing system, those have now all been updated to leverage the new system.
• Newly setup 1stream tenants will now have the Manage Organization permission properly set to Yes for the initially created Admin permission group.

FFotW: BLF Keys

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Busy Lamp Field keys, or BLFs, allow a user to setup quick speed dials to perform key actions like setting their status, transferring a call to another extension, or parking a call like in a traditional "Call on line 1 for XYZ" announcement.

While these aren't available on the mobile app, you can utilize these on the vast majority of physical devices as well as the webclient.

Users can modify their own BLF keys within the webclient settings, or you can set them via the admin panel by editing a single extension or using Bulk Management > Bulk Edit > BLFs

For more details, see our article on Setting BLF Keys.

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.