I have a small customer looking to update their aged telemarketing system. I ran across astGUIclient and Vicidial (http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/) during a Google search and was wondering if anyone had any experiences to share, positive or negative. Thanks. -- Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com>
Hello, I am the creator of VICIDIAL(which makes me a bit biased) and there are over 700 installations that we know of in use in over 70 countries around the world right now. It is stable and has a very high uptime percentage in properly installed and scaled systems, and we have done installations of VICIDIAL for companies from 1 to 300+ seats. VICIDIAL is GPL and free, and there is a very active community support forum. There are also paid support plans available. Hope that helps, MATT--- On 7/16/08, Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com> wrote:> I have a small customer looking to update their aged telemarketing > system. I ran across astGUIclient and Vicidial > (http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/) during a Google search and was > wondering if anyone had any experiences to share, positive or > negative. > > Thanks. > > -- > Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com> > > _______________________________________________ > -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- > > AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona > Register Now: http://www.astricon.net > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:35 AM, Matt Florell <astmattf at gmail.com> wrote:> Hello, > > I am the creator of VICIDIAL(which makes me a bit biased) and there > are over 700 installations that we know of in use in over 70 countries > around the world right now. It is stable and has a very high uptime > percentage in properly installed and scaled systems, and we have done > installations of VICIDIAL for companies from 1 to 300+ seats. > > VICIDIAL is GPL and free, and there is a very active community support > forum. There are also paid support plans available. > > Hope that helps, > > MATT--- >While I respect and appreciate your "biased" opinion, I was hoping for more input from objective users. Thanks :-) -- Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com> NOTICE: This E-mail (including attachments) is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C.2510-2521, is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any retention, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. Please reply to the sender that you have received the message in error, then delete it.
Ein Bielaczyc wrote:> > While I respect and appreciate your "biased" opinion, I was hoping for > more input from objective users. > > Thanks :-) > >I object to your objective of finding objective users. In fact, I find it objective. ;) PaulH
Hello, You can try posting on the VICIDIAL forums asking for feedback from average users: http://www.eflo.net/VICIDIALforum/index.php MATT--- On 7/16/08, Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com> wrote:> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:35 AM, Matt Florell <astmattf at gmail.com> wrote: > > Hello, > > > > I am the creator of VICIDIAL(which makes me a bit biased) and there > > are over 700 installations that we know of in use in over 70 countries > > around the world right now. It is stable and has a very high uptime > > percentage in properly installed and scaled systems, and we have done > > installations of VICIDIAL for companies from 1 to 300+ seats. > > > > VICIDIAL is GPL and free, and there is a very active community support > > forum. There are also paid support plans available. > > > > Hope that helps, > > > > MATT--- > > > > > While I respect and appreciate your "biased" opinion, I was hoping for > more input from objective users. > > > Thanks :-) > > -- > Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com> > > > NOTICE: This E-mail (including attachments) is covered by the > Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C.2510-2521, is > confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the > intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any retention, > dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is > strictly prohibited. Please reply to the sender that you have received > the message in error, then delete it. > > > _______________________________________________ > -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- > > AstriCon 2008 - September 22 - 25 Phoenix, Arizona > Register Now: http://www.astricon.net > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users >
Ein Bielaczyc wrote:> I have a small customer looking to update their aged telemarketing > system. I ran across astGUIclient and Vicidial > (http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/) during a Google search and was > wondering if anyone had any experiences to share, positive or > negative.Well, you do have to realise that you're putting almost anyone who may have had a negative experience with ViciDIAL in the difficult position of effectively slandering it, or at least earning the ire and distaste of many other list members, most certainly including the authors. But, that's no reason for self-censorship. So, with apologies to Matt Florell and others: Personally, I've found that ViciDIAL generally works - in a practical, functional, utilitarian sort of sense in which programs work deterministically in accordance with their underlying instructions. I think if you want it to do what most people want it to do more or less out of the box, it's probably a good choice. The story is a bit different, however, in the unlikely event that you actually do care about what's under the hood. It proved to be impractical for my intended use because customisation was required, and the code is an absolute nightmare from a developer's perspective. It is a hodge-podge of naive, inefficient PHP and Perl written with absolutely zero regard for maintainability. It is impossible to read, has no discernable formatting characteristics, is often obfuscated, poorly spaced, arbitrarily indented, and follows no consistent or useful nomenclature or conventions. It's a lot of spaghetti code, and it does not leave one united with the impression that functional decomposition, abstraction or modularity is valued at all, let alone as a guiding value. I suspect many -- although certainly not all -- of limitations to its scalability stem from resource consumption caused by extremely inefficient algorithms, flow control constructs, and serial database interactions that involve repeatedly swapping data in and out of the programmatic layer in high-volume transactions, transforming it, and sending it back to the database. There also appears to be considerable reliance upon the database as a real-time IPC mechanism--another very deadly anti-pattern. Additionally, it has far too many processes, many of whose essence is not clearly or easily understood by the naked eye. If the code were readable, this wouldn't be so bad. But as it stands, in addition to the ugly hack that results from retrofitting astguiclient in this fashion, there are plethoric, innumerable Perl / AGI scripts whose coherence can only be depicted with evocations of a Rube Goldberg device. So, as long as you are interested only in the superficie, it seems to work pretty well, although I can't comment on the overall stability, bugs too much. However, if you are interested in development or customisation, you need to run for the hills, because nothing short of a complete, categorical, wholesale from-scratch rewrite -- one with some evidence of method -- is going to untangle the catastrophe that boils under the deck. -- Alex -- Alex Balashov Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671 Mobile : (+1) (706) 338-8599
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 08:33:44PM -0400, Ein Bielaczyc wrote:> I have a small customer looking to update their aged telemarketing > system. I ran across astGUIclient and Vicidial > (http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/) during a Google search and was > wondering if anyone had any experiences to share, positive or > negative.Well, I'm not quite as biased as Matt... :-) (For those not playing the home game, I've been the network admin at VICI Marketing, where VD was written, for about 4 months now...) It's not bad. It's very big and powerful, and therefore it's a touch complex, which is unavoidable, but by and large, it Just Works: most of the problems I see here are peripherals issues, rather than the core. We run 240ish seats, which we're about to expand to 260ish, on 12 fronter servers and one Core2Quad closer server (which handles over 70 seats by itself); all closers record all calls (tmpfs). Is it perfect? No. But a lot of the problems I have with it come more from the fact that I'm new to it, I think, than that it's bad. Let's just say that managing that for production and 30 other servers and 40 other Windows machines leaves me plenty of time to keep up on Slashdot. :-) If there are any specific questions you have, lay 'em on me. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra at baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Josef Stalin)