Zoho CRM / PhoneBridge and Asterisk Server Integration

Zoho CRM / PhoneBridge and Asterisk Server Integration

Hello,

Some time ago I made the investment into an Asterisk PBX for my business.  This choice was do in large part because of the significant discount I could get with rates over wholesale DID trunk lines and and several of the flexible ways that I could leverage the behavior of the IVR over most other systems.

Furthermore, and a significant factor in making that decision was that Asterisk was apparently well supported by Zoho PhoneBridge.

Unfortunately, right about the time I invested the time and money to get my Asterisk server up and running, Zoho unexpectedly pulls it's support for Asterisk making the claim that the transition to OAuth2 from the earlier Auth Tokens was the cause. 

As Stan on South Park would say, "I call Shenanigans".

What makes this almost cringeworthy from the start is that Zoho has managed to migrate (insofar as I know) everything else across it's wide array of services - a fairly significant undertaking, but this same company didn't have the technical capabilities or in-house resources to do the same for something as simple as PhoneBridge?  Really?

If OAuth2 was the reason that Asterisk support was removed, then why are there still so many third-party telephony providers who use Asterisk as the backend for their cloud based hosting services still able to provide PhoneBridge... YeaStar, Zadarma, EnJay, and astTECS, among others.  It seems that the move to OAuth2 didn't inhibit any of these providers from providing passthrough PhoneBridge support to their client base.

Furthermore, setting up an account on one of these providers directs me through to the same OAuth2 authentication screen as any other OAuth2 authenticated service would require.  So based on that, it seems obvious that there was no problem in adapting OAuth2 to the Asterisk PhoneBridge connector, and that it was already working and fully functional all along from the start.  Naturally I don't want to use a third-party service.  I want to use *my* server and *my* trunk lines no differently than I would have been able to a year and a half ago.

So among a myriad of disappointing phone calls, Zoho's latest is to respond by referring me to astTECS to add the PhoneBridge connector as a hosted service that astTECS provides... for a single fee of $500.  I'm trying really hard to wrap my head around why I should have to pay anyone anything for a service that was originally included in my Zoho One subscription for free (and that I relied upon to be available after I made a subsequent investment towards).

I have yet to hear any reason from Zoho that makes any sense as to why Asterisk PBX support was pulled from PhoneBridge.  But some possibilities include:
  1. Zoho Voice would be easier to push if Asterisk was not as attractive of an option.  This actually seems highly likely as part of the reason since the Desk support for Asterisk was pulled within literally a couple of days before Zoho Voice was officially launched.
  2. Some behind-the-scenes arrangement between Zoho and astTECS created an incentive for Zoho to offload it's Asterisk support to them - possibly because Zoho didn't want to continue supporting Asterisk.
And so there's another question that I really haven't been able to figure out: Where are all of the other Asterisk user's voices.  If I was happily VOIPing along, minding my own business, and then one day some troll stopped me at a bridge and demanded $500 before I could carry on, I'd personally feel rather compelled to speak up about it.  Did all of the previous Asterisk/PhoneBridge users just pony up $500 cheerfully without anything to say or without any mention of it that can be referenced anywhere in the forums?

Or were they all grandfathered in and given free astTECS lifetime subscriptions?

Or alternatively are they still running PhoneBridge as they have (either with the original or updated connector) directly through Zoho as before, only using some legacy UI that's blocked to the rest of us.

And lastly, why does Zoho restrict this API when every other API is accessible directly to the user.  If it was opened to the user, I would have happily just written my own connector and you wouldn't hear me complaining about it in the forums.  What the upside here for Zoho?  Why keep this closed??

-Bryan

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