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Archive for the ‘VOIP’ Category

I was recently contacted by Packt Publishing and asked if I would review a book about 3CX. I was more than happy to as we use 3CX and I am a supporter of the 3CX product (See my past blog on setting up 3CX).

The 3CX IP PBX Tutorial Cover

The book is titled the 3CX IP PBX Tutorial authored by Matthew M. Landis and Robert Lloyd.

What is this book about? This book is titled “The 3CX IP PBX Tutorial” therefore it is a tutorial and a hands on guide to 3CX for beginners and administrators of software PBX solutions. The book is meant to guide you through setting up 3CX for business or home office use. It brings you from start to finish in a short amount of time.

What I liked:

In this book the authors aim to give a real world approach to setting up 3CX. They did a good job at organizing the steps and order of implementing a 3CX system. This will help someone that has never worked with 3CX or any PBX solution. I like how the authors went into the history of 3CX and background on VOIP/PBX as well.

There are many components that make up 3CX besides the core such as: the soft phone, the 3CX assistant, and reporting tool. In the beginning of the book they covered these components so you would get a good understanding of what 3CX is made of and what it can do.

The section titled “What 3CX is not” is valuable real world knowledge. This would help someone easily identify if 3CX meets their needs or not before getting too involved.

Chapters 1 through 4 covered the basics such as working with extensions, call groups, digital prompts, and install. Most of this was review for me but good information for a beginner.

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3CX Phone System for Windows is a software-based IP PBX. This is what we decided to use. We thought about setting up a trixbox server but decided to give 3CX a try.

What you will need:

• 3CX software
• Purchased VOIP number
• Win XP computer (you can use Vista we talk about XP in this article)
• IIS 6 on your XP OS
• A router that can do port forwarding or port mapping
• The 3CX soft phone (you can use X-Lite but we like the TS feature in 3CX soft phone)
• A static IP, FQDN (routable on the internet), or a dynamic IP
• Time to install, configure and test

Pre Configuration:

• On your firewall and or router open Ports 5480, 5482, 5483, 5485,
• Setup a static map or forward of ports: 5060-5100 (TCP and UDP), 9000-9015 (TCP and UDP) and 3400-3499 (TCP and UDP) to your PBX server.

NOTE: forwarding ports 5060-5100 covers Port 5090 (TCP) for the 3CX Tunnel. The 3CX Tunnel is so that users can connect to the PBX server remotely to get an extension.

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