Is fop2 dead?

  1. 6 years ago

    It seems that fop2 is no longer being maintained or support - Can anyone confirm or deny this??

    I spoke with Nicolás (via live chat) in November last year but I've failed to make contact with anyone since. I have a couple of support tickets open (I bought 10 hrs paid support!!) but the tickets seem to keep closing every 24 hrs by an automation rule. I have emailed several times too and the live chat is always "offline". Looking at this forum there has been no posts from admin for about 5 months now. This is all very alarming as our 2 call centres rely so heavily on fop2 therefor if things don't improve or fop2 really is dead then I'll be forced to look at an alternative and pull the plug on fop2. I know Nicolás was working on Issabel PBX so my concern is that he is focusing all his time on that instead which is such a shame as fop2 really is such a great product!

    Any information would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks.

  2. Well... I suppose it's a good thing we've got a community forum to continue to support it among ourselves, for what that's worth.

  3. I finally got a hold of Nicolás so fop2 isn't dead after all! :)

  4. Edited 6 years ago by avayax

    This forum never really was a community forum, but rather a place where the developer provided free support, as he was the only one answering questions.
    My guess is that that wasn't sustainable anymore.

    Now it's a "community forum", however a dead community forum, as nobody really knows much about FOP2.

  5. Well, it is not really "dead" -- just on life support. Many users know a lot about FOP2. We have to because Nicolás supports FOP2, Asternic Stats and Issabel almost single handed. I did get chat support with one of his knowledgeable associates at one point. I have found most answers scattered among this forum, the docs and google.

    In any case, if you ask a question here, it is more likely to get answered than if you don't ask. :)

  6. Edited 6 years ago by BlazeStudios

    Honestly, as far as I am concerned the project is pretty much dead. Keep in mind this is from someone, who in the last 12 months, has given Asternic/FOP2 almost $1,000 USD for all the pro licensing and the majority of plugins. In that time I opened a single bug ticket on a rather simple bug and it's been idle for almost 9 months now. Not even a single reply to it.

    But if you look at it overall, there has been no major or significant update to FOP2 in years. Chan_SIP has been dead since August or so of 2014. It's 100% community supported now, Digium doesn't touch it anymore. Just like IAX2 (which has been dead longer).

    Asterisk has had numerous updates and additions to it, not just with PJSIP but all around. The applications and functions have been updated. Some functions have been deprecated, new functions have been added. Asterisk Manager Interface has had updates/additions not to mention the introduction of ARI.

    As of right now any version of Asterisk that isn't 13 or 15 is completely, 100% unsupported and will never see any updates, bug or security fixes. This just isn't a FOP2 issue, it seems that many third-party companies that have made their mark on Asterisk programs all stopped trying and/or caring around Asterisk 12. It's been almost 4 years or so since these updates and changes have been around. Plenty of time to have made updates.

    This is the problem I had with Issabel. I had a Issabel box running for 2 hours, that's it. Long enough for me to spin it up and see that all of its core pieces are based on End of Life and unsupported versions of Asterisk and FreePBX. I could never put an Issabel system in for a client due to those facts alone.

    At this point, since there is a serious lack of support and development on FOP2. I'm going to have to spend 2018 either finding another solution and writing off all the money I spent on FOP2/Asternic. Or I'm going to have to tear apart FOP2 and just make it work with the current versions of Asterisk and move forward that way.

  7. I haven't invested as much as you have, only a few hundred dollars and I am ok with that, but it would be a pity to see FOP2 go away, cause what are the alternatives, isymphony? Not for me.

    I have been running FOP2 on a High Availability FreePBX distro, which makes for a slightly more complicated setup, and a recent distro upgrade broke FOP2, so my operators are now just using plane physical phones to do their work.

    I also looked at Issabel but it didn't look appealing to me as well for the fact that it uses old software (FreePBX 12 is dead).

    Initially I started out with PIAF, which looked good at the time, but the heavy conflicts with them and Sangoma made that project die very quickly as well. Bad for someone using the software in production to have to completely reinstall something else from scratch.

    For now I am sticking with Sangoma, prospects look fairly good for them to be around longterm.

  8. Well it would seem there is a new update out there. I had quite a few paid plugins, including the one that had my bug report on it, marked as "Upgrade".

    I've upgraded all and now the bug has been fixed. I've also noticed an upgraded version of FOP2 was released less than 3 weeks ago, just no notice.

  9. admin

    22 Mar 2018 Administrator

    Hi guys,

    First of all, please accept my apologies for not being able to respond on the Forum lately. I have been traveling a lot lately (attending conferences, and for work).

    It does not mean any of our products are dead. Not at all. There is constant work, effort and love being put into all of our products. There are frequent releases, you can check the ChangeLogs for each product to see that additions/fixes are done almost on a daily basis.

    I am grateful for the users that take the time to participate in this forum and help others, and I want to let you know that you will still receive direct support for me when I am available on our sites.

    Sometimes you might not see it, but believe me there is lots being done: from making the software work with newer versions of Asterisk (there are recent changes for compatibility with Asterisk 14), adding support for more backend engine configurations, adding new features, fixing bugs and doing support.

    You might find me or my colleagues online at the live help at www.fop2.com and www.asternic.net for live/real chat, with very knowledgable people (not bots, not outsourced). Email is unfortunately not a good medium any longer for support (for me at least). When doint support we need to ask a lot of questions to get a grasp or idea of a problem, and doing so via email takes forever. The ticketing system we have setup is broken and I really did not have the time to fix it. I will probably take it down and rely on the live help builtin ticket or move to our own customer portal.

    I am pushing updates to Asternic CDR Reports, Asternic Call Center Stats, FOP2 and plugins every week, trying to schedule on a new release every month for FOP2 and probably the Asternic suite. Sooner than later I will release the Dialer officially, I am nearly a feature freeze point and then it goes to testing and documentation process. It is quite powerful.

    I am not very good communicating stuff, I enjoy coding and engineering challenges more than writing a nice post about a new release. We do not have marketing people helping out, and that is probably why you might get the sense of abandonment, Just check the live help from time to time, or check the download pages for every product and keep an eye for new versions.

    Best regards,

  10. admin

    22 Mar 2018 Administrator

    Hi guys,

    First of all, please accept my apologies for not being able to respond on the Forum lately. I have been traveling a lot lately (attending conferences, and for work).

    It does not mean any of our products are dead. Not at all. There is constant work, effort and love being put into all of our products. There are frequent releases, you can check the ChangeLogs for each product to see that additions/fixes are done almost on a daily basis.

    I am grateful for the users that take the time to participate in this forum and help others, and I want to let you know that you will still receive direct support for me when I am available on our sites.

    Sometimes you might not see it, but believe me there is lots being done: from making the software work with newer versions of Asterisk (there are recent changes for compatibility with Asterisk 14), adding support for more backend engine configurations, adding new features, fixing bugs and doing support.

    You might find me or my colleagues online at the live help at www.fop2.com and www.asternic.net for live/real chat, with very knowledgable people (not bots, not outsourced). Email is unfortunately not a good medium any longer for support (for me at least). When doint support we need to ask a lot of questions to get a grasp or idea of a problem, and doing so via email takes forever. The ticketing system we have setup is broken and I really did not have the time to fix it. I will probably take it down and rely on the live help builtin ticket or move to our own customer portal.

    I am pushing updates to Asternic CDR Reports, Asternic Call Center Stats, FOP2 and plugins every week, trying to schedule on a new release every month for FOP2 and probably the Asternic suite. Sooner than later I will release the Dialer officially, I am nearly a feature freeze point and then it goes to testing and documentation process. It is quite powerful.

    I am not very good communicating stuff, I enjoy coding and engineering challenges more than writing a nice post about a new release. We do not have marketing people helping out, and that is probably why you might get the sense of abandonment, Just check the live help from time to time, or check the download pages for every product and keep an eye for new versions.

    Best regards,

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