Newfies-Dialer provides all of these functions, and in addition to which, supports multi-tenancy which lends itself to companies wishing to offer voice broadcasting services to its customers, as well as organisations that wish to broadcast emergency, marketing and informational messages to their customers.

Read more about Newfies-Dialer as autodialer solution : http://www.newfies-dialer.org/auto-dialer-software/

This latest incremental release adds the following features:

•  Installation script now supports CentOS 6 as well as Ubuntu 12.04.
• Option to export CDR and Survey reports as a:
  • CSV file
  • Excel Spreadsheet
  • JSON file
• Various bug fixes for which we thank the Newfies-Dialer community for bringing them to our attention.

These features are in addition to those released in version two, including extension dialling for press one campaigns, Do not call functionality, and with the addition of extra modules, answering machine detection and SMS broadcasting.

For more information, browse our website, or contact us for more details.

Yours

The Newfies-Dialer Team

Call Transfers allow you to create a telephony application such as “To talk to an agent, press one”. The call will then be bridged to an agent or queue on a remote PBX.

We have also added other requested features :

• DNC (Do not call) allowing a contact to press a key to be added to the DNC list
• Call Conferencing, to automatically dial contacts and put them into a conference.

Live Call Transfer and Do Not Call List – Newfies-Dialer

The benefits of Newfies-Dialer now include:

• Tested at 1 million calls in less than 5 hours.
• AMD (Answering Machine Detection) module.
• Press-one campaigns with Live-Call Transfer feature.
• DNC support.
• SMS broadcasting module.
• Flexible survey and IVR editor.
• Comprehensive reporting.
• Professional installation, training and support.

A full list of the changes to Newfies-Dialer can be found at https://github.com/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer/commits/master

Any telecom company wanting to provide multi-tenant voice and SMS broadcast facilities to their customers, a business that needs to broadcast marketing, emergency and informational messages to their contacts or real time live transfers lead generation, may wish to consider Newfies-Dialer. Please contact us for more details.

Yours,

The Newfies-Dialer Team

We will be introducing the new Version of Newfies-Dialer at the weekly FreeSWITCH conference.

Please find the slides to follow the presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/areski/newfies-dialer-autodialer-freeswitch-weekly-conference-13-march2013

Download PDF: Newfies-Dialer – Autodialer : Freeswitch Weekly Conference 13March2013

For instructions to join the conference, please see http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2013_03_13

We set up a test environment and imported a list of 1 million contacts and set a campaign going to see what would happen, and then tweaked the configuration of the operating system, Freeswitch and database for the best possible performance.

The results were impressive. We were able to make 1 million calls in under 5 hours, running at a constant load of 800 concurrent calls.

The challenge now, for the Newfies-Dialer administrator, is to find a carrier who can handle the capacity of Newfies-Dialer to make calls, and a hosting provider to provide sufficient bandwidth.

Should more capacity be required, Newfies-Dialer can be configured in a distributed architecture using separate servers for dispatching call requests, making the calls and analysing the data from the campaign. Contact us for more details.

Yours

The Newfies-Dialer Team

Phone Blasting and Autodialer software

Survey Templates

The survey has been enhanced to easily allow repetitive surveys and maintain consistent reporting. A survey template is created, and when it is attached to a campaign, a copy is made of the survey, and all reports pertaining to that campaign are correctly linked.

Enhancements to the survey branching, logic and capabilities :

• Retry logic to keep calling a contact until the survey is completed.
• Completion status to denote a survey has been fully completed.
• Branching supports invalid input.Support branching on timeout on a per node basis.
• Capture entries with X digits (i.e. capture phone-number).
• Display calls completed in reporting modules and dashboard.Include variables in Text to Speech.

Answering Machine Detection

The commercial AMD module allows Newfies-Dialer to detect whether the contact answering the phone is a real person answering the call or whether it is a voicemail message.

If the AMD module detects voicemail, then it will listen for the “record-your-message-now” beep and play the message to be left on the contact’s voicemail when recording starts.

Further information about this module can be found at http://www.newfies-dialer.org/add-ons/voicemail-detection/

Other Enhancements

• Continuous Integration – Applying continuous quality control in order to increase the quality of the software.
• Deployment – Newfies-Dialer platform deployed with Nginx, Gunicorn, Supervisord and Postgresql for the best possible performance.
• Better DBMS – We now only support Postgresql so we can concentrate on optimising the database for the best possible performance.
• Comprehensive API – Straightforward integration with third party applications using API’s that correspond to each function available via the web interface.
• Real-time reporting – Overview and detailed reporting of surveys and calls.
• Extension Dialing – Dial the PSTN number, and then on answer send the DTMF for the extension.
• Direct Freeswitch Integration – IVR logic coded in Lua for direct integration to Freeswitch for better performance and  flexibility when adding new features.
• TTS Preview – Preview how the TTS sounds in the browser.
• SMS Support – Commercial module supporting mass SMS broadcasting from Newfies-Dialer. Read More.

A full list of the changes to Newfies-Dialer can be found at https://github.com/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer/commits/master

Any telecoms company wanting to provide multi-tenant voice and SMS broadcast facilities to their customers, or any business that needs to broadcast marketing, emergency and informational messages to their contacts may wish to consider Newfies-Dialer. Please contact us for more details.

Enjoy the video and feel to write comments or drop us an email at  newfies-dialer@star2billing.com

AMD allows Newfies-Dialer to detect whether the contact answering the phone is a real person answering the call or whether it is a voicemail message.

If the AMD module detects voicemail, then it will listen for the “record-your-message-now” beep and play the message to be left on the contact’s voicemail when recording starts.

For more details and costs of providing and installing the AMD module on your Newfies-Dialer platform are described at http://www.newfies-dialer.org/add-ons/voicemail-detection/

It’s going to be another big challenge to keep the lights green, especially as we are planning to keep adding more features in the coming months.

Yours,
Areski

Continuous Integration is the process of applying continuous quality control in order to increase the quality of software, rather than the more traditional method of applying quality control at the end.

Travis CI allows you to test your project with different versions of Python and Django. The integration with github is seamless and there is a great support for Python (http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/languages/python/). Travis-CI uses Vagrant and creates an isolated virtual environment for each of Python version you want to test your project with.

As with anything new, it’s common to meet beginner’s issues. To explain, one of the first things to do before testing your Django project is to install the dependencies, Travis-CI uses Pip. Newfies-Dialer have a lot of dependencies, and if the dependencies aren’t installed in the right order the installation may fail and therefore Travis-CI will also fail to run the tests. Pip sorts dependencies to check for duplicates.

We solved this issue by creating a bash script that installs the dependencies in the correct order:
https://github.com/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer/blob/develop/install/requirements/install-requirements.sh

Then, you need to tell Travis-CI to use the script for installation in your .travis.yml file:

install:
- bash install/requirements/install-requirements.sh


The second issue we met is the setup of the database with MySQL, this article provides the solution : http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/database-setup/

In your # .travis.yml, you need to add the database that will be used for the tests:

before_script:
- "mysql -e 'create database newfies_test;'"


We then created a new settings file for our travis project : settings_travis.py, which we will install prior running our test suite:

before_script:
- cp install/conf/settings_travis.py newfies/settings_travis.py


Another common issue is having your Yaml file “.travis.yml” not valid, this will result with an error on Travis “No Rakefile found”. Travis comes with a good tool, travis-lint which will help to validate the travis.yml file : http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/travis-lint/

Documentation and support from Travis-CI is very good, and we were able to ask some questions on their IRC and move forward quickly. We have now an astounding service that takes care of the Continuous Integration and we can say this has been a very pleasant experience.

Our next steps are to increase our test suite, try to improve our code coverage and of course keep our test results green.

See Newfies-Dialer on Travis-CI : http://travis-ci.org/#!/Star2Billing/newfies-dialer