NetFortris

Formerly Fonality

Cloud communication

Security

Managed network

SIP trunking

VPN

I feel that their architecture should be more robust and have interoperability functionality.

Pulling calls is simple and quick. A click and drag of the mouse and it's done. Very useful in high-stress calls that need a takeover.

Monitoring calls is easy and can be done with whispers to the agent on our end, which is extremely useful.

It's great for being able to have a pulse on what everyone n the company is doing at any one time.

I would like a smaller view, so I don't need the whole screen to see everyone, but that's not needed by everyone.

The interface is easy to use and it is very simple to program trees.

Cost benefit ratio is simply amazing! So powerful and you don't need to have your own pbx locally. For a mid-sized business like ours it is wonderful. We have the power of a full VoIP solution without the need of a technician or hardware more than the basic you already have to be connected to internet!

The possibility to record sensitive calls and save them. That provides our customers with an extra layer of security.

Sometimes I notice a few problems using Chrome but probably that is something that is caused by the constant changes on browsers.

I think that a cool feature could be to create menus and trees graphically like a flowchart. But that's only my crazy idea.

Ease of use. Fonality works as well (if not better than) our previous land-line based phone systems. The transition was incredibly easy thanks to its ease of use - and Fonality's onboarding team was extremely responsive whenever we had a concern.

Pricing. Fonality's pricing model is very intuitive and is easily budgetable.

The mobile platform allows our on-call teams to give our customers the confidence that their calls will be answered, even if it is after hours, and no one is physically in the office.

Id like to see recordings be integrated into Fonality's main CP. Today, these are separate, and make the QC process a bit more labor intensive than it should be. Additionally, the search features are a bit cumbersome.

The overall control panel, while very effective, looks dated, an the overall UX is behind some of Fonality's other competitors (CoreDial for example).

Proactive support would be nice - with our QOS as part of Fonality's system, it would be nice to receive automated notices whenever a potential issue arises, as opposed to being reactive to a service-impacting issue.

From an administrator's perspective, Fonality makes administering the company's phone system easy. Configuration menus and setup options are logically structured and easy to understand.

Technical support has been very good. Early on in our deployment, we had some nagging voice quality issues which were network related. Fonality provided exceptional support even though it was not technically their issue. It is important to know ahead of time how well your vendors work with other vendors for integrated services like a VOIP telephone system. Fonality support demonstrated their patience and perseverance in helping us resolve our issues.

Although we don't use remote office capabilities much, the ability to set up phones on the system in remote locations has been a significant help to several of our departments.

I would like to see a better designed HUD program, the PC and Mac based telephone interface to the Fonality PBX.

Deployment for employees outside the office. They will ship the phone directly to our remote employee and I can configure the phone from the web panel.

Their response time to outages is unacceptable. I don't think they realize that our phones are our bloodline for business, their tech support is lackadaisical about when our phones will come back up etc. We probably have an outage 4-6 times a yr. You can't talk to their technical team directly, you have to talk to "Tech support" who talk to the technical team which is just frustrating and takes longer to resolve issues.

The phone call clarity is just average, we hear other calls in the background (not very loud but still noticeable).

VoIP Phone System, so cost is kept low in comparison to a traditional phone system.

HUD manager allows us to see all extensions and whether they are on a call or available.

Call quality has been excellent.

Call log reporting could be better.

On-site product is truly built on Asterisk/CentOS, able to debug and manage detailed issues that go unsolved with other vendors.

Voice uptime (along with Flowroute SIPs and FiOS) has been as good as telco.

We specifically inquired to the sales rep about an on-site version of the product, which we thought we purchased. In our discussions part of this was the requirement that the system be up even if Fonality or our connection to Fonality was down and he answered it would be that way. What we have found is the mobile and web portions of the product are served from Fonality SaaS itself which has had carrier issues in our time with them. Worse, our on-site Fonality server requires integration with their SaaS system even to login (???), and they push configuration changes to our on-site system with no change control per client. This means bugs we have worked on with Fonality support where fixes were implemented directly in our system via config files, and which never make it back into the Fonality core system constantly overwrite our changes. Most of these bugs have come back and we are now just living with them, although they are categorized as annoyances. Upshot: Sales was misleading.

We were given the choice on a few brands of phones Fonality offered. On a recommendation from a very large Yealink rollout from a family member (non-fonality), we went with T42g's and T46g's. We have since found Fonality offers no specific services or controls over this brand of phone, meaning that while basic functions like calls and number keys work, features like on-screen directories are TFTP hacks we must maintain, there is no way to propagate a configuration change across all phones from Fonality, and controls for things like constantly blinking voicemail indicators when we have Fonality set to email their voicemail are not available except through temporary hacks to to our server that get overwritten by Fonality.

When we started the implementation we were assigned a bright project manager who coordinated with us over google docs. It became clear this was a new process for them and the organization of data and specific requests became unmanageable as different engineers and PMs entered our project which lead to many mistakes in our build with constant re-dos which drug out implementation/testing time. Support has been a mixed bag; it's evident there are really good agents and engineers working at Fonality, however as time passes it gets harder to be assigned one or get access. Our recent interactions have been reduced to "restart your server", "no you can't do that", "Oh that didn't work for you. We have nothing else, we are closing the ticket". We run our own support division and also use ZenDesk - this would never fly with us.

HUDweb audio no longer works for us, which means we cannot use the native web-based softphone. When we got the product (Q4 2015) we were told there was an issue with the audio plugin for Chrome on Mac they would eventually fix. The problem has now spread to all platforms and all browsers. It appears Fonality relies on NPAPI or custom proprietary (MS?) libraries that are no longer web-compliant or supported, even on Windows 10 with recent Firefox or Chrome. To our knowledge our users no longer use the web feature which is a complete failure considering the expectations you would have of a modern VoIP system. The HUDMobile product has had a 50/50 chance of working since we opened it up to our users. Neither product provides logging or support for our technicians to help diagnose issues. Regarding HUDMobile, problems arise largely when outside our network, which is understandable save for the requirement the software also talk to the Fonality SaaS system which is whitelisted for communication. We ended up using Wireshark to identify specific issues with the way each was attempting to communicate with our Fonality on-site server and Fonality SaaS (still in question why this is in play when we purchased the on-site product). We found Fonality engineers to have little understanding of how Cisco and Juniper identify and manage VoIP traffic across NAT, left alone to figure out a solution. We were successful for about a 6 month period until Fonality updates or configuration changes.

The web-based administration tool is awkward, first calling Fonality's SaaS system to be "blessed" and allowed to continue. It appears to proxy data from our server through Fonality, which makes every click's request/response round trip painful, especially when working with our phone, user, or extensions lists. We were given specific instructions on how to manually work around interface bugs when adding/modifying phone devices in the Fonality system that have never been addressed in the software. This makes for difficult knowledge transfer to new staff.

Reports are excellent to track number of calls, length, and you can even audit calls.

Ability to work from anywhere. If weather is an issue, employees can log into the queues from their hubweb and the caller has no idea they are not in the office.

The softphone is wonderful because it's one less machine on your desk - wireless headset and control panel on the computer.

Limited storage for recorded calls are an issue.

Softphone is tied to the internet so when one goes they down they all do, but they do offer hard phones, the softphones are just more user friendly.

Web interface is easy to use.

Setting up new phones and users is quick.

Fonality provides good support if there are ever any issues.

Quality service and easy to work with.

Sometimes the account managers take longer to respond when dealing with account issues.

Should have access to add a new phone directly through the web, but Fonality needs the MAC address to do that.

Setting up the company directory could be more straightforward.

Record all feature allows me to record every conversation made from each user.

Enjoy using the HUD.

Works well with Salesforce.

Would like to see more support on the third party app side. For example with Salesforce it was not working as intended at first but got it working within a week. I would like to have seen a shorter resolution time frame.

A more user friendly control panel. The UI takes a little time to get used to.

I can't think of any other areas.

Customer support: Phone communications are critical for us. We continue to use Fonality because of their constant up-time. When issue arise, Fonality support is quick and knowledgeable which leads to prompt resolutions.

Connectivity: We have employees in the US, Canada and Asia and are employees are able to communicate easily as if they are in the same building.

Ease of use: The fonality control panel and HUD provide an easy interface to manage the account and calls.

HUD mobile: app is buggy and needs significant improvement. Fonality should not be charging for this app in its current state. We do use the app and it is helpful for mobile employees but it could add so much more value to the Fonality solution if it worked correctly.

Cost: Fonality is more expensive than other solutions. We had resisted change to date due to the hassle of changing all of our settings and ported numbers. It makes it more frustrating that Fonality regularly promotes discounted offers but when we inquire, we are always told that the offer is not applicable to the offering we have.

Fonality's HUD software is the highlight of the product.

The control panel (console) is based in the cloud and is ridiculously slow. Fonality will always blame this on its customers never taking responsibility. At some periods it literally takes over a minute for the settings to refresh. We have used Fonality for over 4 years and this has never improved.

Support is very hit and miss. You will get a very courteous and experienced tech on one call. The very next call will end up oversea's and unskilled. Generally support is horrendous.

Fonality charges a 100.00 per phone to set them up. More often then not I have to wipe the config and redo the setup. This brings the cost per phone way above the standard. you have to purchase phones through fonality and pay setup. you can purchase from other resellers but fonality requires them to be sent to them for setup.

fonality provides no maintenance with the support. they do not send out information regarding vulnerabilities to their system. Twice in 4 years we have been hit by vulnerabilities that could have been prevented.

Tech Support. I was able to contact 3 different very knowledgeable support agents in the wee hours of a Sunday morning and was back up and running without missing a beat. After a service outage the CIO called me personally on a Sunday to apologize and explain what had happened and what was being done to prevent the issue from happening again.

Pricing!

Sales Rep: My guy is very knowledgeable and available. I first contacted him on a Saturday morning.

Their Basic Call Queue sends callers to the same agent. I needed to disable call waiting on the instrument to correct this.

When first setting up with them there was 2 different support teams and you couldn't get a question answered without a scheduled appointment. [I think this is no longer the case.]

User Control Panel is unwieldy and slow. Luckily it's mostly set and forget.

The ability to make tree structures for routing your calls is very intuitive. Auto-routing is a breeze and anyone can learn it fairly quickly. Also having the ability to upload your own hold music playlist is great.

Customer service are friendly and you receive top notch service.

User management is simply laid out and has more than enough functionality out of the box to satisfy any admin.

Even though you are an admin and have access to the control panel, you really do not have full control of the server. So calls once and awhile to customer service will be needed.

Admin control panel page takes forever to load. Any changes that need to be made every click takes about a minute to load.

The Web interface for the control panel can use a but of an update.

Fonality support is very quick to respond to our calls and efficient at resolving them whether its an training/education issue or technical problems with our VOIP phones or server.

The HUD - Heads up display to see all of our calls, conferences etc and to be able to drap and drop to route calls is very useful.

The programmable "find me, follow me" feature is very useful for getting calls to our users who are not bound to a office desk extension, easily fowarding to their cell, home #'s on a schedule.

Programming the call menu to handle the voice prompts and routing is easy to set-up and manage

The annual cost of support is significant. We have very few calls into support as it is seldom needed. It would be nice if we could have the option to pay on a per call basis vs annual support contract.

Managing Call Center queues

Add/Moves/Changes of extensions.

Use of Heads Up Display (HUDO

Easy Call forwarding.

setup of HUD app for phones.

Add management of do not disturb feature per extension.

Add central control ability to remote reboot extensions.