[freeside-users] Questions about Freeside features

[Juan Luis Baptiste]

Hi Erreu,

On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 2:23 PM, Erreu Gedmon <eg at keyway.net> wrote:

> I'm a little confused. Some of these are listed right on the main page of
> the website, http://www.freeside.biz .
>

As you say, some of them, but not all (if you imply that all the features I
inquired for are available on Freeside). At this point we are evaluating
several different products so I haven't had the time to really dig into the
demo.

This morning I had some time to play with the backoffice demo and answered
some of my questions, like lead management, called Prospects on Freeside,
spanish localization, and the Operator portal could be the appointments
calendar on Freeside, good. But there are others that aren't that obvious
from reading the feature page or the documentation. Maybe I didn't explain
my self enough:

* Contract management, here I mean the management of customer contracts
with signing to avoid using paper.
* Hardware inventory, be able to centralize all of the ISP hardware
(routers, settop boxes,towers, antennas, radios, etc)
* support of different hardware types, like ftth, this one is related to
the previous one. Looking at the demo I found something called "Hardware
types", but I'm not sure how to use it, it seems to be a tool to describe
the different types of hardware you will be using ?
* Automatic deactivation of customer account for late payments, if the user
doesn't pay or go over his plan rates, automatically suspend their account.
Does this has to be integrated with a Radius server ?
* Documentation on Integration of 3rd party systems, for example, we have a
lot of experience with OTRS[1] as our ticket system and consider that is
more feature rich than RT, so it would be nice to know what would be needed
to use it instead of RT. Also as OTRS can be used as a hardware inventory
manager I could use it for that task too if Freeside can't.
* Providers on the cloud, so far the only one I can find is the one listed
on the website[2]

I will continue to explore the demo but I hope someone can answer these
general questions about Freeside features. We are a small team and some of
us don't have much experience on this field and are learning along the way,
so please excuse me if I do questions that maybe look stupid or vague.

[1] http://www.otrs.com
[2] http://freeside.biz/freeside/hosting.html


Cheers,

KEY FEATURES
> BILLING
>
>     Flexible pricing and rating plans including anniversary billing,
> pro-rating, usage based billing and more. Plug-in system allows easy
> addition of new pricing plans.
>     VoIP rating and billing, including DID inventory, rate plans, free
> minutes, caps, and 800# billing.
>     Real-time credit card and electronic check processing with all major
> processing gateways. Email, fax, printed and online invoicing.
>
> TICKETING
>
>     Complete, integrated trouble ticketing system included, based on
> Request Tracker from Best Practical Solutions
>     Auto-responds to customer email, assigns a ticket number and allows
> your staff to track requests collaboratively
>     Multiple queues, custom fields, templates, ticket associations,
> templates, customizable workflow, and more.
>
> NETWORK MONITORING
>
>     Complete, integrated network monitoring system included, based on
> Torrus from K-Open GmbH
>     SNMP discovery, collection and graphing
>     95th percentile and volume billing
>
> CUSTOMER SERVICE
>
>     Online signup page with immediate credit card authorization and
> provisioning.
>     Customer self-care including invoice viewing, one-time and recurring
> payments, adding and removing services, and password changes.
>     Simple API available to write your own self-service pages or
> applications.
>
> RESELLERS
>
>     Unlimited resellers with branded invoices, individual pricing and
> payment gateways.
>     Virtualized reseller access allows resellers access to only their own
> customers.
>     Flexible, fine-grained access control
>
> Are you asking because you couldn't determine the answer after looking at
> the demo? http://www.freeside.biz/freeside/demo.html
>
> Erreu Gedmon
>
> --
> "You see persons and things not as they are but as you are."
>         -- Anthony De Mello
>
> On 01/26/2017 01:23 PM, Juan Luis Baptiste wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a new user here, I'll be working on a small rural ISP on Argentina.
> Currently we use an in-house developed platform to handle everything
> related to the business, but it's starting to sh
> ow its age and will not be able to scale, so we started looking for a
> replacement, and among our search we found freeside. I have been reviewing
> the feature list and documentation (which bt
> w is very scarce) and I have some questions I was hoping to get answered
> here to get a better idea of Freeside capabilities:
>
> * Operators portal, where operator can see their pending installations,
> admins can schedule new/modify installations, etc.
> * Commercial lead management.
> * hardware inventory management.
> * Support of ftth hardware.
> * Possibility to integrate with external systems like other CRMs,
> ticketing systems (like OTRS), inventory (like glpi), reporting tools, etc.
> * Customer contract management.
> * Taxes customization so we can adapt it to local Argentina rules.
> * Automatic deactivation of customer account for late payments.
> * Localized interfaces with spanish support.
>
> I think that is for now, I'll be playing with the demo to get a better
> idea of what Freeside offers, but in the mean time answers to these
> questions would be of great help.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> --
> JLB
>
>
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-- 
JLB
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