sipXecs adds a fully featured conferencing server. That conferencing server is based on FreeSWITCH and over the last couple of months a very good cooperation emerged between the two respective developer communities. There are lot's of synergies between FreeSWITCH and sipXecs where FreeSWITCH provides a very powerful state-of-the-art media framework. sipXecs adds ease-of-use Web based management, cluster management, and all the other services provided by sipXecs already. More info is available on the sipXecs Wiki .

 Some of the key features of the new conferencing solution include:

• Every user of sipXecs can have a personal conference bridge. When a new user is created the system can automatically create a bridge extension for that user.
  
• Users are able to fully control the conference bridge from their user portal (dynamic conference control)
• FreeSWITCH is integrated as a service of sipXecs. It auto-installs and all configuration is done automatically by sipXconfig
• Several FreeSWITCH based conferencing servers can be configured in the system, each on separate hardware. This allows the creation of a massively scalable conferencing solution all with centralized Web management for configuration and process control
• The conferencing server supports a variety of codecs and does proper mixing

What else are we thinking to do with this?  The next component we will base on the FreeSWITCH media framework is a new IVR for sipXecs. As an initial step this new IVR will replace the existing sipXecs auto-attendant. It includes a powerful scripting capability based on Java that allows the creation of all kinds of new IVR based applications and it provides the same level of performance and scalability the conferencing server does. Another very interesting idea is to replace the sipXecs voicemail application with a new one based on FreeSWITCH, but more on that later. 

What we like about FreeSWITCH is its scalability and resource efficiency. Initial load tests indicate that we should be able to run up to 1,000 calls (some voices even claim it should be much more than that) into the conferencing server on very ordinary hardware and with other sipXecs components running on the same server. Combined with the sipXecs cluster management capability a literally huge conferencing server can be built.

The new conferencing application is available in the current development branch of sipXecs (release 3.11) and will get released with the upcoming 4.0 release of sipXecs.