Postponement of upgrade weekend because of Ukraine/Russian conflict
We wanted to provide an update with regards to the planned Hosted IPPBX upgrade coming weekend (the weekend of 18/19/20/21 March).
Considerations this week:
As you will be aware, the terrible events in Ukraine are evolving on a daily basis with no sign as to when this could be resolved.
We are in daily conversations with all our technical and development staff involved and with PortaOne, the manufacturer our solution is based on, to understand how everyone is and can update you on the following:
- Any and all staff of ours that is/was in Ukraine, or any other area affected by this conflict, are safe and accounted for at this time.
- PortaOne has made contact with 120+ members of staff who are all are safe and well. They are establishing contact with the others and hope they are just experiencing temporary connection issues.
- The areas where PortaOne has engineering centres are currently still under Ukrainian control.
- Both Voyced and PortaOne have enough staff capacity to continue providing support services in the usual fashion and, if necessary, both can call upon resources from centres in other countries.
The situation continues to change at pace and whilst the upgrade of our platform is important, it is not as important as the wellbeing and safety of our friends and colleagues at PortaOne.
We didn't put any pressure on them to ensure the upgrade is carried out on 19th/20th March.
We have now decided to postpone:
By now it is becoming clear that the events in Ukraine are showing no signs of ending soon and as a result, we have taken the decision to postpone the planned upgrade this weekend.
Both our staff and the PortaOne teams continue to provide excellent support and as far as we are aware all their staff are still safe and well and we will continue to monitor this 24/7.
We will work with our and the PortaOne teams on a new date for the upgrade and will advise as soon as this has been scheduled.
With thanks for your understanding and support and kind regards
the Voyced management team & staff.
We are going to implement a major jump and upgrade the Voyced Hosted IPPBX platform to the next stable version, V9.5.1, over the weekend of 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 March 2022.
(This is the replanning of the earlier, postponed upgrade.)
Description:
Over the last year and a bit, we have invested heavily in extra hardware, testing and adding functionalities to our Hosted IPPBX solution.
Some of these functionalities have already been 'released' into the wild (some in a smaller group, some for everyone already) without actually notifying you.
This will all change from now on as we have many more functions and services already lined up and we'll let you know and communicate more to let you know.
With this upgrade, we are going to make a giant leap forward and you'll love the extra features that we have prepared for you!
As always, any upgrade has been tested very extensively in our testing and extra created redundant environments before we decided that the actual implementation can go ahead.
This so that the upgrade on the live systems should go through quickly and without a flaw.
The upgrade procedure has been separated into several parts spread over the three days of the weekend and we'll create separate announcements for these steps as pre-tests have passed correctly, we get nearer the time and plannings are set.
The simplified steps involved will be:
Friday
- Friday evening: Remove portal access to force a data freeze
- Friday evening: Start migrating current database clusters to the new database clusters in all data centres and apply Hosted IPPBX patches.
The Existing Hosted IPPBX solution is untouched throughout the upgrade until hand-over to the new Hosted IPPBX platform version.
Saturday
- Saturday morning: Test new Hosted IPPBX solution with migrated database clusters.
- Saturday night: If testing is successful, instruct the SBC to direct customer traffic to the new Hosted IPPBX solution networks in all data centres (active calls will be terminated).
If significant issues are found at any point in the process we will revert to the 'old' IPPBX platform version.
Sunday
Early Sunday morning: Monitor and continue to test the new Hosted IPPBX solution.
In conjunction with the manufacturer of the base solutions and our development and tech teams, we will apply any quick fixes required (there should be none).
If any major issues are identified, the SBCs are instructed to move traffic back to the 'old' IPPBX platform version.
If no issues are found, we will re-enable portal access at some point on Sunday night or early Monday morning.
End time: 21/03/2020 07:00 (UTC)
Apart from the mentioned 'data freeze', to prevent settings from changing during this process, there should have little or no impact on customers in the short term.
The risks will likewise be low because of our extensive testing and the ability to revert to the current version if so required.
The extra benefit from this major upgrade comes in the form of future upgrades, both in terms of the features that become available and the flexibility of their introduction.
The excellent news and just some of the new options this will give us all
This upgrade will give many new security and stability features and will further implement the geographic redundancy that we have started to roll out in 2017 and have made available for Free to the whole of our customer base as the first major service update in 2019.
If you have not set up/changed your local devices and/or systems to use Geographic redundancy, we strongly urge you to do so a.s.a.p.
All the information you need is in our Basic Setup knowledgebase article, as always.
So, we're sure you are curious and want to know what is going to be new and improved, right?!
Amongst the numerous improvements, additions and preparations for future features in the background, there are many new and improved features for you, the user.
The following is only a limited list of functions that are improved or added that you will see/experience on your user side:
- Call transfer recall so that your 'blind' transferred call come back to you if the transfer does not get picked up
- Higher security, including the often asked Extended length password
- Personalized response messages for incoming calls
- xDR download enhancement
- Preparation for enhanced support for IPv6 endpoints
- Call supervision with 3 modes: spy, whisper, barge-in
- Added language support for a few new languages and we've updated some languages too
- Custom prompt for the dial-by-name directory
- Sound Quality Check function
- Call Barring Management
- Enhancements to the VoiceMail services and messages
- Up to 25 times faster processing of Voicemail
- SIP Update as an additional keepalive request option
- Enhanced on-demand call recording and Call recording announcement
- Role-based Hosted IPPBX access which you, the client, can set.
- Extended configuration of music on hold for Call queue and Call queue announcements configuration enhancements
- Further improved handling and troubleshooting of audio streams and single audio issues where the user's local equipment doesn't 'follow the rules'
- Improved Paging / Intercom function
- Many new enhancements that will help us troubleshoot any issues, such as registration issues, you may come across
- We're extending the API calls library so we can create even better and more integrated custom solutions for your situation
- The current upgrade and expansion is done in such a way that we can roll out future updates and upgrades without any downtime
- and much, much more
All user-side functions will be made available as soon as we can and we will notify you of the important ones separately.
So, make sure that you are subscribed to the mailing list(s) and we will send everyone those notifications that we deem important enough!
(you can always check your mailing list subscription with our support team)
We thank you for your patience and understanding and apologise for the inconvenience that this essential maintenance work may cause.
If there are any questions or concerns, please contact our technical support team.
Kind Regards
the Voyced Technical team
Take note: If you currently implemented IP numbers rather than our FQDN in any of your devices (such as firewalls), please reach out to us with a ticket asap as this whole exercise will mean (some of) our IP numbers will change!
Thursday, March 17, 2022
