ProVu Win Independent Software Vendor Award at 2016 Comms Business Awards!

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In May, we were named finalists in two categories in the 2016 Comms Business Awards, our shortlisted categories included: Market Maker Distribution Award and the Market Maker Independent Software Vendor award. Last week both our Managing Director, Darren Garland and Sales Director, Ian Godfrey travelled down to London to attend the awards and we are delighted to have been named winners for the Independent Software Vendor award!

Our independent software, ProSys was launched in 2006 and continues to be developed in-house by our development team. For those who are not familiar with ProSys, it is our online portal which allows resellers and service providers to access a range of tools designed to ease the fulfilment of Customer Premise Equipment, more information can be found on our ProSys information page.

As part of our entry process we were asked to submit a case study which demonstrates how ProSys has revolutionised our customer’s processes. For this we chose to focus on how we adapted our systems to work better for a leading Service Provider, here’s a glimpse of some of the work our development team carried out:

Among our range of value added services, we offer zero touch automatic provisioning for phones, and an API that enables resellers and service providers to integrate their services with ours. Through our API, customer orders can be placed on their websites and fed directly through to our despatch queueing system, however sometimes we need to unwrap our services a little to make them work for our partners.

The service provider in question had their own phone provisioning systems and their own ordering systems which they wanted to feed directly through to us in order to automate their order process. In response to this we created a completely bespoke API for them.

Through our developments, ProVu now sit in the middle with this service provider’s orders; we receive the order from them, translate part codes to their own part codes, ship the items and then they pull the order status information back from us to display on their system and populate their own provisioning server.

This particular service provider had a unique set of requirements which were not available elsewhere in the market. As our systems are developed in-house, we were able to solve their problems and they now have a solution which is entirely within their control, but has all the benefits of the automated ProSys workflow.

Our team work exceptionally hard to develop our systems to ease the fulfilment of CPE and it is a great honour to win such a prestigious award. We are delighted to have been recognised among other leaders in the Channel and are very happy to receive such recognition.

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Gigaset C430H Update

C430HXThe Gigaset C430H has been updated and has changed to the C430HX. The C430HX looks identical to its predecessor and there is no change to the pricing. The only difference between the two models is the C430HX includes Cat IQ 2.0 technology and supports HD voice.

ProSys firmware provisioning

It has always been possible to manage firmware upgrades using our online phone management portal, ProSys. Support staff can do this very quickly by selecting from a drop-down box of available firmware on the portal.

What happens if you want a newer firmware, or just one which isn’t listed in the drop-down (yet!)?

Well, fortunately, it is possible to provide a custom setting in most cases to allow you to select the firmware you wish to provision to a device.

Proceed with caution…

You can use the “Quick entry” to add configuration settings to an individual device.
This allows you to add (key, value) pairs to the provisioning settings, giving you the power to provision firmware directly.

key value
Gigaset SYMB_ITEM_BS_IP_Data1.aucS_SPECIAL_DATA_SRV http://p.gigaset.me.uk/profiles/n510_238/42/fw238.bin
Panasonic FIRM_FILE_PATH http://pana.provu.co.uk/fw/TGP5xx-DECT-22.88_HW1.fw
snom firmware http://snom.provu.co.uk/sw/snom300-8.7.5.44-SIP-f.bin
Yealink firmware.url http://yealink.provu.co.uk/fw/T41/36.80.23.1.rom

Warning: If you are not sure you are doing this correctly, then stop! Speak to our technical team (support@provu.co.uk), we are happy to help.

As always, feedback is welcome, so please do get in touch.

Learn about the new Sangoma PBXact UC systems

With last week’s launch of the new Sangoma PBXact UC Appliances, we are inviting resellers to join us for one of two webinars introducing the series of high-performance communication solutions:

  • Wednesday 29th June at 15:00 (GMT+1)
  • Thursday 30th June at 11:00 (GMT+1)

Find out more information and register your attendance

Presenting the webinar will be ProVu’s Muhammad Bajwa and Simon Horton from Sangoma Technologies. We expect the webinar to last approximately 45 minutes.

Easy TG582 router firmware upgrade

You can connect to the TG582 router’s command line interface using telnet which gives you a great level of control over this router.  You need to be connected to the LAN side of the router, you cannot do this over the Internet (unless you are VPN’d to a PC on the local network the router is on).  The default login username is “Administrator” (yes. uppercase ‘A’!) and the password is the web interface password (blank by default).

You will need to have the firmware file hosted on a web server somewhere, lets say the URL for this is http://myserver.com/tg582firmware.bin.  The server this is hosted on doesn’t need to be on the local network with the router as long as the router has a working Internet connection.

Iissue this command in your router’s telnet interface:

software download url=http://myserver.com/tg582firmware.bin filetype=firmware

It may ask you for some other options, just leave them blank (by pressing the return key).

Then your router will download, reboot & upgrade itself.

Note: on the new TG588 & TG589 routers there is no need for this as you can simply upgrade firmware in the web interface.  Some of these do have a command line interface but it is totally different to the TG582 and doesn’t seem to be very useful (yet).

Sangoma PBXact UC Systems Launch

We are pleased to announce our launch of the new Sangoma PBXact UC phone systems! These systems offer fully featured, commercially supported communication solutions for 10 to 5000 users / endpoints.

Sangoma PBXact UC comes pre-loaded with many advanced commercial features including Call Recording Reports, Conference Pro and Voicemail Reports.

PBXact UC 10 10 users / 5 calls
PBXact UC 60  60 users / 30 calls
PBXact UC 100  100 users / 30 calls
PBXact UC 300  300 users / 120 calls
PBXact UC 1000 1000 users / 300 calls
PBXact UC 5000*  5000 users / 1000 calls

* System 5000 is due to be launched August 2016

PBXact UC is designed to work seamlessly with all Sangoma IP phones, offering a collection of phone applications which allow users to control functions and settings directly from the screen of their phone. The Sangoma phones also offer zero-touch installation, once plugged in the phones will automatically detect the system and provision themselves.

 

If you would like to discuss these new systems please email contact@provu.co.uk or call us on 01484 840048. We have a webinar coming up on the 29th and 30th of June to help introduce the range, to register please visit www.provu.co.uk/webinar-pbxact-introduction.

New Blog

You may have noticed we have a new blog!

We have a new design and are using a new blog software (wordpress). The old blog was a little bit dated. With the new setup, we hope to have more members of staff from ProVu writing interesting articles for you.

For the technically minded. We are using Nginx as the webserver and caching layer. The site is fully secure with DNSSEC and TLS. And the site is dual stack with IPv4 and IPv6.

You can test our TLS setup using SSLLABS. You should find we score an a+.

Seamless Paging Integration between Algo and Polycom

We launched the Algo 8188 SIP Ceiling Speaker back in January which joined our expanding range of Algo paging and alerting devices. This SIP ceiling speaker can integrate natively with Polycom™ Group Page for overhead announcements.

The 8188 provides additional coverage in common areas or where sound reinforcement is needed, like classrooms, lobbies or hallways. The 8188 can also be configured to join Polycom paging groups or zones.

Polycom Group Page has no dependency on a SIP server and therefore the 8188 also integrates seamlessly with Skype™ for Business/Lync™.

 

SIP Initiated Group Paging
Polycom VVX phone calling Algo 8180 SIP alerter which simultaneously launches a local Polycom Group Page.

Polcom Group page with Algo 8188 diagram

 

Algo paging endpoints have multicast broadcast capability. While paging or alerting, they can simultaneously multicast over the network.

Polycom Solution Guide: Group Page with VVX600 & Algo 8180/8188

Introduction to CounterPath Bria Stretto Webinar: 21st June


Are you still manually configuring softphone clients on customer computers, tablets or mobile devices? Do you have to log in to each of your customers’ computers every time there is a problem with their softphone client or you want to make a change to a setting? If so, we have the perfect solution for you; CounterPath Bria Stretto is a provisioniable, cloud managed softphone which allows you to manage all of your Bria Stretto softphone clients from a secure centralised server.

Join us on Tuesday 21st June at 11:00 AM for our Introduction to Bria Stretto Webinar to find out more.

Register to attend the webinar

Webinar Topics Include:

  • What is CounterPath’s Cloud Hosted Stretto platform and how does it work
  • What is the difference between Bria 4 and Bria Stretto softphone client
  • How the Stretto platform can benefit ITSPs and IT Administrators
  • What license types are available from ProVu
  • Stretto add-on modules