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I recently consulted for a company that wanted to do an integration between FreePBX and Zendesk.

Call Flow:
When a call comes into the IVR and the caller "presses 2 for support" a support ticket is automagically generated in their Zendesk dashboard. 

Using the built in features of the Asterisk AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) and the Zendesk API makes this a pretty straightforward task to accomplish.      

It's been over six months now that Twilio has opened up its Elastic Sip Trunking to the masses.  This video will show you how to hook up your FreePBX box to Twilio's Sip network and take advantage of their super low per minute rates.
 

Geting vicidial (vicibox7) configured to send email via Sendgrid requires a few extra steps.  Here is what you need to do in order to get things moving. Speedy Delivery!!!

I recently built out a simple single task application for a call center and decided it would be a great use case to install Lucee as the ColdFusion engine.  The Lucee windows installer comes bundled with an IIS connection script, but no option to connect Apache. Here is what is needed to get it running.

On July 12th, 2016 Microsoft pushed out a large security patch (MS16-088) that prevents HTML wrapped dynamically generated .XLS files created by ColdFusion from being opened in Excel 2010, 2013 and 2016.

Previous to the security update Excel would prompt the user to confirm that they wished to open a file from an untrusted location. After the security update Excel opens to a blank screen with no warning dialog or explanation of why the file did not open.

This issue doesn’t only impact .XLS files created by ColdFusion. It appears that it affects other platforms including large players like Salesforce.

I have a large volume customer with a Vicidial cluster that I set up to convert call recordings to MP3 format and FTP them to an archive server where they are cataloged and accessible via a lookup tool. Everything was working great until their FTP server went down and they didn't realize it for 14 days. This post outlines how to set up audio conversion and FTP, and what was done to get the 14 days of recordings moved over to the archive server.   

The recommended method for locking down Vicidial is to allow only whitelisted ip addresses access through the firewall. 

However, the call center I contract for has a lot of "at home" agents with dynamic IP addresses. Updating the whitelist manually became a difficult task as more agents with dynamic IP addresses came online. They needed a way to automate the process of updating the whitelist on the pfSense firewall in real time. I investigated several options, and decided that creating my own solution was the best route. 

Vicidial has a lot of great features out of the box to build forms and scripts for agents to follow. However, sometimes it is worth the time and investment to create custom web forms that can greatly improve the call flow, and help agents obtain more accurate data. 

In order to create a real time dynamic ip whitelist solution for a client I needed to be able to SSH into a pfSense fiewall using ColdFusion and kick off a few .sh files to update the firewall's ip whitelist. ColdFusion dosen't have the ability to ssh directly, but by using <cfexecute>, Putty and Plink you can get the job done.

When making a request from Internet Explorer 10 the initial page would load without issue. Any subsequent request would hang. Once the server was hung the site was also unreachable from any other browser on any other platform.