Nobody wants to install a version that has a lot of zero digits at the end.

So we did not loose too much time to come up with a version 5.0.1. For those who installed version 5.0.0 it is an excellent opportunity to try the upgrade through the web interface. No matter what OS you are using, you can just put the http://snomone.com/downloads/snomONE/version-5.0.1.xml link into the software upgrade field in the PBX, then let it work for some time and schedule a reboot.

After we released 5.0.0 we soon had to find out that if you don’t have the Microsoft Lync enabled, the administrator could not change the PIN for extensions. This was caused by a JavaScript error on the browser; but because there was no notification it could drive admins crazy if they try over and over again to change the PIN and never get to their mailbox. The fact that PIN are not encrypted on the file system (a feature introduced in 4.5) wasn’t making life easier either—all you could see was some spaghetti in the XML on the file system.

Another important mishap was that the template for the FAX message was actually empty. It simply got forgotten in the build process. For those who had problems getting fax to mail working, yea that could explain it.

Also we had the opportunity to get more exposure with another feature, the Microsoft Lync presence update. While it was possible to get it working also in 5.0.0 already, we made a small but important change to the DNS lookup procedure. Microsoft Lync wants to see _sip._tls prefixes as well, and if they are present it does make the setup a lot easier. We have made a page http://wiki.snomone.com/index.php?title=How_to_use_lynchosted.com where you can see in this example how to set it up.

We internally started to use Office 365 and you can imagine that we also planned to publish our extension presence state into the cloud as well. However we had to find out that Lync in 365 works slightly different that Lync on customer premises... We will have to add some more code into the PBX to make it possible to use the 365 presence features. It is more than a small patch, and it might be version 5.1 that will make it possible to use Office 365 Lync with snom ONE. Don't worry, we are reminded about this feature every day while we are working.

Apart from that, the feedback from customers who upgraded to 5 was general good. Most complaints were about the hectic changes in the license model (which is understandable), but it seems the product itself and even the activation process itself is in good shape. We have a few smaller things in the pipeline for 5.0.2 and also some changes for 4.5. I expect the next minor release in a few weeks and those who like to stay up to the latest are welcome to upgrade their systems.