We continue our series of VoipNow 3 articles with another important improvement introduced by VoipNow 3 – account level reorganization.

This reorganization will affect any software integration you might have with VoipNow. Although we tried to preserve compatibility, it was not totally possible, therefore you have to modify your SystemAPI calls to match the new concepts.

History

When we started building VoipNow seven years ago, we took the account levels used in hosting products as a model. That’s how we ended up with the following management levels:

• Administrator – the entity managing the system
• Reseller – the entity reselling services
• Client – the customer of the reseller
• Extension – although the name is not very suggestive, it’s an user with a telephony functionality attached (phone terminal, IVR, queue, etc)

Frankly, this is a poor organization by today’s standards, due to many reasons:

• When VoipNow is used in business environments, it’s hard to understand what Resellers or Clients are
• An extension is usually used by an employee in a company or by a residential user. The problem is that many users would want to have multiple extensions.
• The only way to have users with multiple extensions in VoipNow 2.5 is to create multiple Extension accounts, which introduces different complications for both providers and end-users such as multiple resource pools, different logins etc.
• The association between an user and some extension types does not make much sense (eg: Intercom).

VoipNow 3

VoipNow 3 editions have different account level organization. We will discuss VoipNow 3 for Service Providers, as it will come first.

In this edition, you will see the following levels:

• Administrator – the entity managing the system
• Service Provider – the entities that provide services on VoipNow
• Organization – the end-user that uses the system. Might be a company, non-profit, public entity etc.
• User – the users inside the organization, members of the organization

Each User is allowed to own an unlimited number of extensions (this can be adjusted with Roles) and some resources such as charging plans, disk space, sounds etc. are shared between the extensions of the user. This means that you can create plans that are more flexible than in VoipNow 2.5.

What to Expect on Upgrades

Your administrator account is going to be unchanged, Resellers accounts will be converted to Service Providers, Clients to Organizations and Extensions to Users with a single Extension. Also a limit of one extension per user is enforced on these users. You can change this after upgrade.

We hope this is an welcome improvement. Stay tuned for the next article in the series that will cover Extension Virtualization.