As we release version 1.0 of Q-Suite NG, it makes sense to explain why we felt that a next-generation product was necessary. After all, Q-Suite 5 has flourished. Hundreds of sites have used Q-Suite in many situations. Resellers and system integrators have been happy to white label it, develop products on it, and host it for their own clients.
So why mess with a good thing?
The quick answer is that it’s getting harder to build new solutions on top of the Q-Suite 5 infrastructure.
Q-Suite developed in an evolutionary way. Q-Suite version 5 was intended to solve a lot of the problems that had cropped up in 3 and 4. A major redesign with Q-Suite 5.7 of the dialplan builder signalled the start of a new approach to development. With Q-Suite 5.8, we redid the agent screens and reports to call the APIs we had created earlier.
Using our APIs, customers and integrators have been able to build their own reports. They’ve also built their own user interfaces.
Unfortunately, it has sometimes meant a bit of coordination as they figure out how to do what they want. That’s due to the mix of functionality spread across several layers of the product.
After 17 years of company experience, we know what today’s customers want.
We also know both the best way to develop solutions, while allowing us to develop new features more quickly.
In fact, it’s been clear how we can do what others have already done with Q-Suite 5: Take a fully functional core, and quickly add a user interface and configuration panel.
With Q-Suite 5, updates to the user interface were time consuming and complex. We had to make sure that we weren’t breaking old functionality as we bent software to new purposes.
Adding new verticals meant hacking into the middle of the code and adding complexity to something that’s already complex. Each new case has its own constraints and requirements. Starting new meant throwing away everything we were already doing. This results in an inconsistent experience from one customer to the next.
Integrators don’t want the front end. They want a back end that works. They want APIs. They don’t want to have to guess what they need to do themselves, or find the hidden assumptions built in.
Q-Suite NG allows us to offer this ability to integrators. And if it’s available to integrators, it’s available to us. We no longer have to build a one-size-fits-all interface. If a new use case appears, we can quickly build a front end to meet those needs. Different verticals can have a different UI.
Or we can easily integrate our product with somebody else’s CRM.
That’s why we built Q-Suite NG.