I'm excited to announce FreePBX 2.7 Final available for immediate download. We have over 2000 systems running 2.7 at the time of this posting and continue to see more features and increased stability as FreePBX evolves. The bugs encountered during this release were minimal and most of those addressed in the bug tracker were already existing bugs from earlier releases fixed during this Milestone (and most of those not back ported to 2.6.

When it comes to busy queues and FreePBX, it often results in requests for help in the forums and to our support department because of overloaded systems or certain functions that do not seem work right.

Progress on both the 2.7.0beta1 and v3 General Preview release candidate have been going great with lots of activity. The 2.7 beta will be moved into release candidate state this week along with an upgrade module provided to upgrade from 2.6 systems for those who prefer to use the GUI and stay clear of tarballs and SSH.

Just a quick note to all of you who may be trying to access the v3 SVN repository either directly or through the trac browser. The SVN repository is currently down and not accessible. We are aware of the problem and it is being addressed. This is related to some of the maintenance issues we have had that are being investigated.

Thanks for your patience while we address this and we expect it to be back up later today.

As promised we are releasing the Beta 1 of FreePBX 2.7.0. This release is relatively minor though it does have some goodies that will be well received. The biggest change for this release is the new FAX module that will replace the previous FAX abilities in core and add support for Fax For Asterisk (FFA). Legacy FAX support will still be there for those not using FFA.

We have a planned maintenance outage scheduled soon and have had a few unplanned outages in the past month, so I thought I would take the opportunity to update you on both of these.

First off we were informed of a possible outage as follows:

Start time (central):	10:00pm CST Jan 24
End time (central):	2:00am CST Jan 25
Expected Interruption of Service:	less than 20 minute

The development team has been busy as usual on both the v2 and v3 front with some good stuff to come shortly. We are planning to get 2.7 into beta by the end of the month with a fairly short beta cycle to release. The v3 release has been a developers evaluation up until now with some plans to make it into a general evaluation release candidate soon.

In case you missed it, our lead developer Philippe Lindheimer gave a wonderful presentation on FreePBX at Astricon this past Oct. (2009). The presentation gives a very nice overview of FreePBX, its capabilities, and what the future holds. See it here:
http://www.astricon.net/2009/astricon/presentation/FreePBX/index.htm

When my sailing buddy contacted me to ask if I wanted to help sail his newly acquired boat from Tortola, British Virgin Islands to Cape Canaveral, FL I knew it was going to be a hard decision. Do I abandon FreePBX for a month and go sailing the Caribbean or keep coding?