Wazo Platform: Documentation community feedback

Hi everyone!

We’re interested in feedback about the Wazo Platform documentation.

Links

Wazo Platform documentation: https://wazo-platform.org/uc-doc/
Wazo Platform API documentation: https://wazo-platform.org/documentation

Here is the feedback gathered from Milad Razban.

Feedback from Milad

Context and History

  • Objective: make a Cloud FreePBX (multi-tenant) or light Aircall
  • Tried OpenPhone with Twilio
  • Lots of bugs at the time
  • One nice thing about them: Inboxes per DID for one user
  • Issabel is a near fit for the need, but not exactly
  • Currently trying Wazo

Experience from Milad with Wazo Platform:

  • Pretty easy to install technically
  • Then “What should I do to have calls?”
  • How do I get Wazo Platform to make some calls?
  • Wazo has everything for telcos AND for developers
  • But developers don’t know telephony and telco don’t know developer APIs
  • Need better doc oriented to those two attendance
  • API documentation is very wrong, lots of examples that are different from real calls
  • Documentation is not reliable, which slows down development, need to try everything
  • API is too atomic: need too many requests to make something
  • JS SDK:
  • documentation is also wrong, not updated when code changes
  • See a simple version, but don’t know really what’s the difference with the other pieces of code
  • WebRTC demo is not working
  • Wazo is much harder to understand than Twilio from the developer point of view
  • Wazo API gives NO clue about what API should be called together
  • Doc for writing a new plugin for Wazo Platform is too scattered
  • How to make a blacklist plugin in Wazo?
  • How to make something that will replace Twilio?
  • Twilio is easy to use in North America, but less known on other continents, so Wazo has an easier time reaching there
  • Search button on the Wazo Platform website is not intuitive
  • What’s the difference between APIs /calls and /applications ?
  • When looking at the website, we can’t see an overview of what Wazo can do.

Suggestions

  • Tutorial for basic setup
  • Devs already know the Twilio docs so Twilio-like docs would be great
  • Move search of the documentation website elsewhere (closer to content)
  • Write interviews for Wazo developers
  • Offer a support package for the community

Actions

  • Milad will share interview-like questions directed to people knowing Wazo Platform well in order to spread the knowledge about Wazo Platform internal processes and API. The objective is to have material to write use-cases for the Wazo Platform documentation.

Other feedbacks

Any other feedback about the Wazo Platform documentation is welcome!

Contribute

If you’d like to contribute to the documentation, you can open a pull request on Github!

3 Likes

I think the Wazo team has tried hard to meet the needs of developers who will be devoting serious time to working with Wazo and customizing a solution for paying client. Your focus has been on the API documentation.

For that, I applaud you.

I understand there is less effort to document the more basic system using a WebUI but I would encourage you to think about that.

I posted a step-by-step manual at

for Wazo 20.17 installation

I received thanks from a number of folks.

It includes documentation on creating a blacklist on Wazo, controlled by the phone keypad, something requested by the poster above.

I beleive you would garner a large community of amateur developers who could spread the word about your great system if you made it easier (better documented) for the amateurs to get going with it.

I realize the risk of inviting people who will not RTFM and insist on just posting questions to a forum about things they have not even tried to solve themselves, but you can manage that risk by deciding what posts you respond to. And, with a larger community, there will likely be more community members who can answer the basic questions.

A side benefit of having a broader community is that you have more diverse quality testing. Sometimes (knowledgable) developers share a pattern of how they do things and that gets certain bug discovered. But amateurs just plow in and do things that may not be expected, discovering bugs that were hard to predict since the actions were hard to imagine. Diversity is good! :slight_smile:

Your business. Your call. My thoughts.

2 Likes

Based on theses points

  • Wazo has everything for telcos AND for developers
  • But developers don’t know telephony and telco don’t know developer APIs

Could be nice to have two «training programs» (aka some basic tutorials based on real world examples).

  • 1 training program for devs who want to integrate telecom features in their software / solution
  • 1 training program for devs and telco to explain how to use wazo-platform API ​and their particularities

Improve homepage content and links to help newcomer to discovers the platform easily. (An exercice to do, clear our brain, go to homepage, try to learn wazo-platform like a newcomer)

2 Likes

Hello,

If another people want to add other feedback here, you’re welcome. We are looking for feedback from our community to enhanced the project.

Thank you very much.
Sylvain

@quintana Hello Sylvain,

I’m more than happy to provide you with my updated feedback after working on Wazo for over a year now.
We can have a meeting with other community members and chat about it.

I would suggest, one area that could be improved is having a scalable architecture with a shared DB and services between multiple C5 instances.

2 more suggestions:

1- When a tenant gets deleted everything belongs to that tenant should be deleted too. Such as trunks, users, etc.

2- It would be super useful to have an active/deactive switch for tenants, For example:
Unpaid bills → tenant and all its service should gets deactivated,
When Paid → tenant and all its service should will become active.

Fantastic Idea…2 thumbs up!!!

Thank you for your feedback.

1 Like