Postponement notice:
As you are aware, we had planned to apply a major upgrade to our Hosted IPPBX Solution over the weekend of January 14-16th but this will be re-planned.
Recent discussions with the various internal and external engineers have identified an approach that further reduces any risk during the upgrade process. If this approach is taken, this would involve changing the planning and a consequent slippage in these planned dates.
One of the main operational benefits of moving to this new Hosted IPPBX version is the replacement of SIP clusters with SBCs. This provides us with a much more granular level of control to assist in managing any outages and reducing the impact of future upgrades.
The current plan had us switching the IP addresses associated with the SIP clusters to be routed to the SBCs at a point over the weekend. The advantage of this is that partners and customers firewalls would not need to be changed. This is the way that the base solution provider managed the first few upgrades for their customers. Their experience has now shown that there are some risks associated with this and, because of this, the base solution provider has changed their recommendations, preferring that the SBCs are assigned new IP addresses. Although this is less convenient from a firewall management viewpoint, it is much better for managing the rollout. More importantly, it eases any subsequent rollback which may be required.
Whilst we do not assess the risk of the original approach to be significant, we have to be aware of the advice from our supplier. Even if the risk is low, the simplification of managing a rollback seems a significant risk reduction exercise and worth pursuing. To that end, we have decided to postpone the upgrade until some time in March. To meet our partners’ change management processes, we will be giving at least 4 weeks’ notice of the new date, once a new date has been confirmed with the base solution provider.
We are sorry for the inconvenience this replanning might cause but having been made aware of the reasons behind the change to the supplier’s recommended upgrade process, we fully agree with the risk reduction this brings and believe a replanning is the safest response.
We will let you know as soon as a new planning is made and agreed upon.
End of postponement announcement.
We are going to implement a major jump and upgrade the Voyced Hosted IPPBX platform to the next stable version, V9.5, over the weekend of 14 - 15 - 16 January 2022.
Description:
Over the last year and a bit, we have invested heavily in extra hardware, testing and adding functionalities to our Hosted IPPBX solution.
Some of these functionalities have already been 'released' into the wild (some in a smaller group, some for everyone already) without actually notifying you.
This will all change from now on as we have many more functions and services already lined up and we'll let you know and communicate more to let you know.
With this upgrade, we are going to make a giant leap forward and you'll love the extra features that we have prepared for you!
As always, any upgrade has been tested very extensively in our testing and extra created redundant environments before we decided that the actual implementation can go ahead.
This so that the upgrade on the live systems should go through quickly and without a flaw.
The upgrade procedure has been separated into several parts spread over the three days of the weekend and we'll create separate announcements for these steps as pre-tests have passed correctly, we get nearer the time and plannings are set.
The simplified steps involved will be:
Friday
1) In the evening we will remove access to the online portal of the Hosted IPPBX solution
This will force a data (settings etc) freeze.
2) Once this has been completed we will force all traffic to use the UK clusters only.
We will start upgrading and then testing the alternative geographic clusters.
Saturday
1) In the morning, if testing is indeed successful, we will force all traffic to upgraded alternative geographic clusters.
2) Start UK clusters upgrade en testing.
3) Saturday night we will move traffic back to the UK cluster and continue testing through the remainder of
the weekend. If significant issues are found at any point in the process we will revert to the old IPPBX platform version.
Sunday
1) If no issues are found we expect to be able to re-enable portal access in the early morning.
Apart from the mentioned 'data freeze', to prevent settings from changing during this process, there should have little or no impact on customers in the short term.
The risks will likewise be low because of our extensive testing and the ability to revert to the current version if so required.
The extra benefit from this major upgrade comes in the form of future upgrades, both in terms of the features that become available and the flexibility of their introduction.
The excellent news and just some of the new options this will give us all
This upgrade will give many new security and stability features and will further implement the geographic redundancy that we have started to roll out in 2017 and have made available for Free to the whole of our customer base as the first major service update in 2019.
If you have not set up/changed your local devices and/or systems to use Geographic redundancy, we strongly urge you to do so a.s.a.p.
All the information you need is in our Basic Setup knowledgebase article, as always.
So, we're sure you are curious and want to know what is going to be new and improved, right?!
Amongst the numerous improvements, additions and preparations for future features in the background, there are many new and improved features for you, the user.
The following is only a limited list of functions that are improved or added that you will see/experience on your user side:
- Call transfer recall so that your 'blind' transferred call come back to you if the transfer does not get picked up
- Higher security, including the often asked Extended length password
- Personalized response messages for incoming calls
- xDR download enhancement
- Preparation for enhanced support for IPv6 endpoints
- Call supervision with 3 modes: spy, whisper, barge-in
- Added language support for a few new languages and we've updated some languages too
- Custom prompt for the dial-by-name directory
- Sound Quality Check function
- Call Barring Management
- Enhancements to the VoiceMail services and messages
- Up to 25 times faster processing of Voicemail
- SIP Update as an additional keepalive request option
- Enhanced on-demand call recording and Call recording announcement
- Role-based Hosted IPPBX access which you, the client, can set.
- Extended configuration of music on hold for Call queue and Call queue announcements configuration enhancements
- Further improved handling and troubleshooting of audio streams and single audio issues where the user's local equipment doesn't 'follow the rules'
- Improved Paging / Intercom function
- Many new enhancements that will help us troubleshoot any issues, such as registration issues, you may come across
- We're extending the API calls library so we can create even better and more integrated custom solutions for your situation
- The current upgrade and expansion is done in such a way that we can roll out future updates and upgrades without any downtime
- and much, much more
All user-side functions will be made available as soon as we can and we will notify you of the important ones separately.
So, make sure that you are subscribed to the mailing list(s) and we will send everyone those notifications that we deem important enough!
(you can always check your mailing list subscription with our support team)
We thank you for your patience and understanding and apologise for the inconvenience that this essential maintenance work may cause.
If there are any questions or concerns, please contact our technical support team.
Kind Regards
the Voyced Technical team
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
