Available today as well is an updated preview of OpenVBX 1.1 that includes support for both Connect & Presence. You can now offer service based on OpenVBX without having to directly bill clients for usage and your plugins can listen to Presence events to better help your users communicate.

Twilio Connect

With Twilio Connect you can sign up new Tenants to communicate using your OpenVBX install but not have to deal with the billing. All of that is passed on to the Tenant’s Twilio account.

To use Twilio Connect simply go to your Twilio Account, click on the Apps sub-navigation item and then again on the Connect Apps tab. Here you can create a Connect Application that other Twilio Account holders can connect to via your OpenVBX install.

Enter a Name and a Company Name. In the required URL fields simply enter the base url to your OpenVBX install. When you save your credentials in OpenVBX these will be updated for you. After saving the information copy the Connect Application Sid that is provided.

Back in your OpenVBX install navigate to the Settings section and click on The Twilio Account tab. Enter your Connect App Sid in the space provided. You’ll now be given the choice to create new Tenants using Twilio Connect as the billing mechanism.

When a newly created Connect enabled Tenant signs in for the first time they’ll be promted to authenticate to your application. If they do not yet have a Twilio Account they’ll be able to set one up right there.

Upon acceptance of the Connect agreement they’ll be granted access to your OpenVBX install. If they ever revoke access to your account they’ll be denied access after log-in to OpenVBX, but the Tenant Administrator will be able to re-connect the Application and pick up right where they left off.

And that’s it. There’s no special UI, no special permissions to manage. Your Connect Tenants work just like your regular Tenants.

Twilio Client Presence

With the addition of Presence to Twilio Client OpenVBX can now be smarter about how it connects you to other users in the OpenVBX install.

The Call button in the interface now not only allows you to dial numbers, but it also reveals a list of users in your install and provides a quick dial button for each user. If that user is online with Twilio Client they’ll be dialed in their browser. If they’re not online they’ll be contacted using their primary device.

Other Changes

While Twilio Connect & Presence are the big announcments with this preview there are a few other underlying changes.

This release builds on the previous preview that replaced the internal API communication with Twilio as well as replacing the TwiML generation process. These changes are most likely breaking changes for many plugin developers. We encourage all plugin developers to test against this new code.

This new preview also replaces the use of pre-compiled CSS & Javascript assets with Minify.php. This was done to help make us more compatible and enable OpenVBX to runn well in many different environments. Another blog post is forthcoming to explain the benefits of this new approach and how to get your customized OpenVBX install to add its own assets and gain the benefit of minified Javascript and CSS delivery.

We’ve also upgrade the installer to use MySQLi driver in PHP when available. This should be invisible behind the scenes.

Downloading the Preview

The preview version is located in the GitHub repository in the develop branch. You can check out or branch the preview or simply download the tarball or the zip file.

We’re working hard to test all cases and squash any remaining bugs, but with our goal of supporting many different hosting environments we are constantly encountering areas where we can improve OpenVBX’s compatibilty. We encourage you to help us by testing OpenVBX on different environments and submitting your bug reports.