What I have been pondering for some time, is creating a PBX network for the neighborhood’s organizations and home businesses that allows them to be accessible to the public while protecting their privacy. Calls to the extension assigned to them on our shared phone number will forward to their private phones. Being "on the network" with a phone extension (and email aliases) presents as an endorsement from the neighborhood, that they’re established and trustworthy. Lots of other cool things I could do by modeling our community as a departments in a company on a PBX.

I’ll be getting Google Fiber shortly as a backhaul. I’ll be thrilled if the latency is really low. Now, If only I could find a nice, cheap source for SIP ATAs, I might even resell cheap phone service to cover my expenses.

To an experienced Asterisk administrator, I’m sure FreePBX is a great time-saver. No more editing a dozen different config files and writing incantations in precise syntax. But those admins already know and understand Asterisk inside and out. God bless them.

I’m certainly glad I don’t have to wrestle Asterisk at the cli now, but the biggest challenge for me when confronting the "simple" FreePBX GUI is that it’s still impenetrably dense. It gives me no idea which fields are optional and which ones are vital. Forgive me for thinking it should. I still have to follow tutorials, skimming over pages and pages of blank fields that look important. Optional fields should be collapsed unless I’ve opened them or entered something non-default there. Or at least some color-coding. Some sanity-checking for data entered would be appreciated.

Even basic setup requires hopping around – and back – between various sections instead of being able to get a working trunk-extension-outbound route set up in one place. A set-up wizard is not too much to ask at this point. The state of the art favors creating profiles that are represented as objects you can stick together like a flowchart. I’d rather see that than have menu items shuffled away to new locations. It isn’t the top menu position or theme colors that really impact the utility of a GUI. It’s organization from the *user’s* point of view. Currently, this config still seems to be grouped by the low-level architecture of the server, the developer’s view.

The module update process is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It takes my breath away. I call folks over to my desk just to demonstrate it. The fact that every other click-action results in a response that looks like a fatal error is even more amusing. The Notices box only shows that there are updates waiting. It’s failed to show the names of the updates for many revisions now.

Many of the help popups merely state "The qwerbix-11 field is where you enter your qwerbix-11 information – be careful to use precise syntax per RFC88377882-d.", so it does nothing to clue me in. The embedded help should say what exactly the default config is, too, with syntax examples on the spot.

It would be nice to be able to click the frog logo and get my choice of default views (system status report) instead of the developer’s home page. I sincerely hope these things all improve on the FreePBX front, and I sincerely hope the developers don’t scoff the idea away. It’s dawning on me that so much effort must be going to keep the GUI *working* that little attention is left to making it *useable*. Make it useable and you’ll have more people using it.

In closing, thank you for all your hard work in making things considerably better. Asterisk+FreePBX is obviously extremely powerful, though largely undocumented. I really hope that you listen to your user community and make this GUI more useable. The steering wheel is in the glovebox. The engine has to be stopped and restarted whenever the turn signal is used. The dashboard dials are in the trunk and arranged alphabetically. Some basic re-arrangement would make a GUI better fit the end-user.