PBXtra FonalityWe have been using Fonality for our phone system for well over two years now. In fact, I wrote a quick Fonality review back in January 2006 that still gets comments to this day. Overall, I have to say I am still very happy with the system - it rocks for us, a small high-tech company.

In short, Fonality is a supported and pre-programmed PBX system that you is co-hosted by them and with a server in your office. It runs off the Asterisk code-base, an open source PBX project. We love Fonality because:

(1) It comes with a ton of pre-built solutions so we don't have to build it up ourselves via Asterisk
(2) It is continuously upgraded
(3) We have phone and email support for hardware and software support if needed
(4) We can hack the heck out of it and build it into our PHP solutions because it is Asterisk based

Last night I was emailed that they have automatically upgraded us to the 4.0 version. The main feature in 4.0 is the "FindMe with Boomerang Mobile Integration" that basically is a FindMe feature (i.e. if your out of the office, you can have the system try calling you at different phone numbers and if you like, you can answer it. Then with "Boomerang" when you get back to your office phone and you are still on the call, you can send the call back to your phone at your desk (I could have used that feature a billion times). Here are screen captures of how it kind of works:

You go to your features tab and then you can click on the "FindMe with Boomerang Mobile Integration" and you are shown a screen. Select, "FindMe Using a schedule" and you will see this:

Fonality FindMe & Boomerang Feature

Then based on the schedule you can set up a billion actions based on certain cases. Here is a screen capture:

Fonality FindMe & Boomerang Feature

Schedule is nice, but HUD status is really where it is at. If you use the Fonality HUD feature and set your status to available, away or offline and it will do different things based on that. Here is a screen shot of that screen:

Fonality FindMe & Boomerang Feature

Then at the bottom of each of these options are "FindMe White Lists" and also "VIP Lists" which are self-explanatory.

There are a ton of new features in 4.0 that I need to explore. Here are some:

  • Calendar-based Scheduling
  • Night mode feature
  • Cards pages
  • Faster reports
  • Faster UI
  • New set of alert notifications
  • Many more features which I can't list

There is however a large debate on if Fonality should sell this product. The open source community or at least some of them, are upset Fonality is profiting on this. Personally, they are providing huge value to me at a low cost, so I am all for them selling this. This is seriously a large corporation phone system at a small business price.