Bad experience with Evolution PBX

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I recently installed the Evolution PBX server on my office server and was really expecting to have a great IP based PBX up and running after some basic configuration. What I ended up with was a huge headache! :cry:

The staff at IV was very helpful in trying to get my firewall configured but it turns out that my old Sonicwall soho2 did not have the SIP available to allow correct pass-through. I put the Evolution server outside of the firewall and all went better, but then connections were not completing, autoattendent routing was klunky and I found that the email notifications are being sent from EvolutionPBX.local which is an unqualified domain. This means that anyone with spam filtering probably will have problems. Iā€™m still not receiving any email notifications after spending 1-1/2 hours on the phone with one of their support techs who was trying to configure sendmail to send from my domain with smtp authentication.

So, after more than 50 emails to the Intuitive Voice support staff and many frustrating hours of testing settings and sittin on the phone, Iā€™m left with a ip-pbx that kind of works but still has problems. Today Iā€™m told by their company president that I have to pay for support for them to continue helping me! I was actually going to ask them to pay me for beta testing.

The firewall and email setup issues Iā€™ve experienced are evident that they have not tested it in many diverse environments, otherwise they would have had preemptive knowledge of these problems. Iā€™ve been involved with software development since 1987 and I know the value of a strong beta program that flush out the gremlins and expose the ā€˜gotchasā€™ that happen when an application is put into a real service environment. It seems to me that IV has not really pushed the Evolution product out to various environments to test the waters. With so many anomolies and unplanned problems like the email issue, I really think itā€™s still a beta release.

The Evolution software had a lot of potential, but be cautious if you think itā€™s a completely tested product!

2

Bob,
I regret that you have had this experience with our product. As you are no doubt aware we try very hard to solve our customers issues as quickly as possible and have worked very hard to build a product that is both easy to configure and robust enough for diverse conditions. We are one of the few vendors that you can truly expect to get service immediately when you call. We do all this with a limited free support commitment. Certain customer environments pose more of a challenge than others. In your case we had a firewall that was not VoIP friendly and some email issues that even after converting to a fully qualified domain still rejected email requests from the server. All of this could ultimately be overcome however after spending well over 10 hours with various issues as a business we required some commitment to the product. We certainly welcome and appreciate your feedback and the opportunity you have given us to win your business.

Chris Jones
President
Intuitive Voice Technology

3

[quote=ā€œIntuitiveVoiceā€]Bob,
We are one of the few vendors that you can truly expect to get service immediately when you call. We do all this with a limited free support commitment. [/quote]

Definitely needed with your software!

4

Most firewalls are not Voip friendly. Assuming that a customer has a Voip friendly firewall is a major mistake.

But then, what do I know?