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.

Holiday Bug

We recently received a report from one customer that their Holiday IVR was not properly being utilized, and we've traced it back to a bug where some holidays that were set for the "Every year" option were not actually built out properly.

To ensure no holiday is missed, we recommend all customers that have manually created Every year-based holidays in the past delete and recreate those holidays.

The Holiday Importer and any holidays it created, as well as any individual year holidays, are not affected by this bug.

New Client Checklist

We have a new checklist which you can use for onboarding your clients or onboarding your own system down the line. This walks through the A-Z questions you need to answer when setting up the phone system, and it includes setup documents for each of the steps.

You'll also find license requirement detail on the 8. 1stream tab, allowing you to determine the best license level based on the features they need access to, and the most crucial items to triple check under 0. Critical.

You'll find this spreadsheet located under Partners > Resources > New Partner Onboarding in the main admin portal for phone systems, and make sure you check out all the tabs!

Quality of Life Changes

• We've added a new Use Dial by Name option to the Phone Experience Settings in 1stream. This now allows you to enable the generation of text to speech greetings for the Enhanced Dial-by-Name Directory without our assistance.
• The main partner admin panel has been redesigned slightly to reduce the whitespace in between rows. This will allow you to view more customers or users within the same screen real estate.
• We've also redone the paging on tables in the main admin panel, allowing you to more easily page between resources. This also corrects a longstanding issue where sometimes you would have more pages than results, causing those pages to be blank and broken.
• The Backups menu has been redesigned to provide a progress of the backup as you view the page, and prevent trying to run multiple backups at once.
• The Marked Territories feature now properly works with AutoTask, allowing you to use the Territory field under Associations for a company/account to raise a flag in 1stream for your team.

• There was an issue with some instances where inbound rules were not saving properly, that has been corrected.

• The Blacklist time interval has been changed to a default of 999999999, which will in effect permanently blacklist systems that repeatedly fail to login.
• We've added our Ticket Based Routing to our inbound support queue, to make it easier to reach your bvoip support rep when you're already working with someone. You can add this to your own phone system with the 1stream Engage licensing.

Office Hours

Just a quick reminder that our Onboarding team is available each week in an open office hour, or "lunch and learn". This hour alternates between Tuesdays at 9AM ET and Thursdays at 1PM ET, depending on the week of the month.

Check out our Training Dates page for links to these meetings, this is also available in the Partners menu of your admin portal.

FFotW: SLA Based Reporting

Forgotten Feature of the Week

In addition to the normal data in reports you'll find in 1stream as a Core or higher subscriber, Enterprise licensed users can also utilize SLA-based reporting to provide additional clarity to what quantity of calls were handled in your customized SLA.

Find out more in our Knowledge Base article.

New Academy Domain

We've now updated our Academy learning platform to have a proper subdomain, and you can now find it at https://academy.bvoip.net. All the same content as yesterday, just with a new location to access it at.

Please ensure you update your bookmarks, and if you had logged in using the Moodle mobile app you will need to logout and log back in using the new domain. Old bookmarks will redirect for now, but those will stop working at some point in the future.

Wallboard Messaging

For 1stream Enterprise users, under the Phone System Enhancements menu we've added a new Manage Wallboard Message option. You can plug in rich text formatted messages, one message per line, and these will be shown beneath the Wallboard.

Quality of Life Improvements and Bug Fixes

• We've adjusted the generation of the SIP Authentication Password so that it avoids using characters that are considered invalid for Polycom devices. This should ensure all future extensions can enroll Polycom devices without issue, however previously made extensions may still need a password reset.
• The Extension Exclusion List has been updated to hide extensions on the home page.
• Dedicated servers were not properly reflecting system service issues in the PBX Radar. This has now been corrected, and you should be able to see the service statuses properly.
• Additional error handling has been added to the Microsoft 365 integration, so for instance it will now properly show the error when an API call fails to setup the Teams domain.
• We've updated the backend system to ensure that servers are available in the admin portal within 15-30 minutes after a migration completes, instead of up to 4 hours in some rare cases. Phone system capabilities are always active within moments after a migration completes, and the 1stream integration can take up to 10 minutes to restore full functionality.

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 add you to the list for consideration.

FFotW: User Callback Tool

Forgotten Feature of the Week

Users on any level of our 1stream plans can utilize the User Callback Tool to present callers with the option of requesting a callback from an extension, instead of just sending them to voicemail.

This does require a call app to be installed, if you're on a Per User plan the bvoip support team can assist with that, but then you just check Enable Call Back Feature in the 1stream portal, and test out leaving a voicemail for that extension!

You can find more details on this capability in our Knowledge Base Article.