Introduction

Avalo Networks has been hard at work completing our Spring/Summer Release of Flex UC 4.2. We have made several major improvements to the platform and it’s included apps as well as resolve several major bugs that persisted in 4.0.x (Hosted) and 4.1.x (Deployable).

The biggest changes focus on the unification of the code base into one solution. Previously because of minor difference between the Hosted and Deployed version of Flex UC, two different code bases were maintained. In Flex UC 4.2 we have merged to two into one. This means better control over features, and swifter support response times.

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New Features and Improvements

Avalo Networks releases new features quarterly and our Spring/Summer release is no different. We have made several improvements to our included apps as well as new features which will make management of the platform easier.

1. New Branding Features

The Branding features have been refactored and refreshed to make it easier to setup branded Web UIs for partitions and resellers. You can now preview your customer’s branding experience before making it live.

2. Voicemail Manager Improvements

The Voicemail Manager has been updated to make it easier to use. This app helps you administer the voicemail boxes on an account from one easy to use location.

3. Fax Manager Improvements

The Fax Manager has been refreshed with a new GUI, and will make the management of Fax services on an account much easier by bring all of the functions into one locations for administrators.

4. System Wide eMail Template Refresh

With the release of Flex UC, our eMail templates were redesigned to be more pleasant, yet customer provided us good feedback on how to improve them even more. As such we have released those suggestion in 4.2. Now the templates have a bold new design that has a very “2.0” feel.

5. User Level Preview

Systems Administrators can now impersonate users on Flex UC. In Previous versions as well as generations for the platform administrators could impersonate an account, however all of their permissions were inherently carried over. This makes debugging user level issues difficult. By adding the ability to impersonate a user, administrators can now see exactly what the user is seeing at this access level.

6. Addition of the new Avalo Voice Engine Powered by Google AI

We are super proud of this advancement! Avalo Networks has been researching the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) for sometime now. Currently we use our own home-grown engine to help make decisions about system scaling, and resource management. But we wanted to go a step further into the realm of user voice response. So Avalo Networks has been working to integrate new Machine Deep Learning (MDL) technology into our DNA. Add in the power of Google Cloud’s new AI platform and you have an amazing best of breed solution.

The first use of this Voice Engine will be to improve on our voicemail to email transcription. In previous versions of the platform, we used a outside solution powered by ispeech.org, which was designed to handle Studio quality recordings. It had a hard time with accents, and also couldn’t do on-the-fly language translations. In addition, due to the limited quality of a voicemail recording, at best we were talking about 8hz, even for those with perfectly spoken english, it regularly had errors. Thats all changed, with  the Avalo Voice Engine and our newly created AI (Language Agnostic Native Analysis) or LANA for short, we can better translate spoken word into written.

New advancements in this area are expected in coming releases as we work to create new functions and features with this amazing technology.

7. Call Recording with Amazon AWS Storage

This has to be one of the most requested features by our customers. The ability to record calls, and also off load them to an outside storage engine. In this release Avalo Networks will be offering it’s new Call Recording App, with integrated Amazon AWS S3 Storage. Now you will be able to setup recordings based on the Account, User or even Device. Then we use the power of Amazon AWS to store those recordings in a secured S3 Bucket. It’s that simple.

In future releases we will be adding additional storage options, including private file servers, and Google Drive.

8. CDR Reporting

Customers have been asking for more detailed reporting of Call Activity since we relaunched version 3. But, we needed to make some fundamental changes to the way we store CDRs in the database layer. With the release of V4/Flex UC those changes were put into place allowing us to easily create an App.

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Bug Fixes

Over the past 6 months or so, several non-critical bugs have been reported to Avalo Networks. Efforts have been made to verify and include as many as possible in this release. Some bug fixes are inroad efforts to make future changes to the platform.

1. HELP-34413: Inbound faxes show wrong failure code (TX not RX) if there is a failure
2. HELP-34315: Parking Stops working in accounts after repeat create/delete of parking documents
3. HELP-34437: Improve security of voicemail for customers who do not follow our GUI setup process and misconfigure fields, to avoid hacking of insecure voicemail boxes
4. HELP-34176: Time of Day not working on Mondays in some cases (also fixed as a hot patch in in 4.0 and 4.1-Deployed Edition)
5. HELP-32874: Webhook data not backward compatible with old CDR format (fixed)
6. HELP-33420: Fixed inbound call recording duplicate events
7. HELP-33189: Allow setting Caller ID in SmartPBX for a number in porting state
8. HELP-34868: Enforce media_source for cf_voicemail when recording voicemail greetings
9. HELP-34892: Phone numbers in port_in state are not set to in_service after successful inbound calls
10. HELP-34519: Voicemail-to-Email Notification is disabled: a new voicemail message might be still marked “saved” or “deleted”. BLF improvements for *98 Support for BLF on mailbox via *98 + mailbox number
11. FLEXUC-5837: Device Provisioner Process crashes when trying to get the label for presence combo key
12. FLEXUC-5575: Ring group does not check if device is deleted
13. FLEXUC-5718: Comments entered in the GUI by the user for a port do not cause an email notification
14. FLEXUC-5657: Queries for large number of ledgers can crash kazoo applications
    Improvements to Call Recording storage Ensure storing call recordings to an HTTP URL works as expected (Google Drive / AWS)
15. FLEXUC-5794: After uploading a new whitelabel logo with Flex UC Web GUI on sandbox, 404 on the following request to GET the /logo
16. FLEXUC-5717: Default port email templates don’t include port messages
17. FLEXUC-5736: As a user I want voicemail to not count messages older than retention duration

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Vulnerability Fixes

1. FLEXUC-5848: A sophisticated hacker who gained access to a Flex UC server’s internal RabbitMQ management port, when deployed in a multi-zone configuration, and where RabbitMQ was configured to require a password, could manipulate the WebSockets application to emit the password for RabbitMQ access. This is due to the user/pass being part of the AMQP broker URL itself. These changes were implemented to protect against this.
2. The SBC team found a security vulnerability where a malformed packet can be used to overrun memory space, causing the signaling process to crash. A sophisticated hacker may be able to manipulate memory space for other purposes as well.
3. New DDoS protection has been put into place to help filter and block possible attacks by tracking IP addresses attempting to register to SBCs. In the event an endpoint attempts a register or and sip signaling that does not resulting in a positive response more than 100 times, the end points IP address will be blocked for a period of 24 hours.
4. New DDoS protection has been put into place to help filter and block possible attacks on or “configuration crawlers” on the provisioning cluster. Attempts from a non-approved user-agent will result in the blocking of the offending IP address. Additional provisioning attempts from devices not included in this platform will result in the blockage of the requesting IP address.