HUD2 vs. HUD3

Customers of Fonality's HUD2 product may not immediately see a difference between HUD2 and HUD3. Visually the applications look identical (there are some minor changes to font-handling and icons).

In this article, we'll be describing in detail the technical and feature differences in HUD3 compared to HUD2.

1 Architecture
- 1.1 The bottom line in architecture changes
2 Features
- 2.1 Changes to the feature-set of Personal Edition
  - 2.1.1 Why isn't Outlook integration included with HUD3 PE?
  - 2.1.2 Why are the "call" options disabled in HUD3 PE?
  - 2.1.3 What's HUDlite?
  - 2.1.4 Can I go back to HUD2?

Architecture

HUD2 was built using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as the transmission mechanism to deliver messages (text and program) to HUD2 server. HUD2 server lived on the PBXtra and hooked into the Asterisk Management Interface in order to interact with the phone system.

IRC has been around since 1988 and continues widespread popularity today. However, IRC is not the most resource-friendly messaging application.

HUD3 is built on the XMPP protocol (aka Jabber). Jabber architecture is extensible and is endorsed by the IETF with the full specification published as RFC3920.

All this information is super-geeky, and may not mean much to the average user of HUD.

The bottom line in architecture changes

The change from IRC-based HUD to Jabber-based HUD results in stability and speed improvements. HUD3 is much faster than HUD2, and uses fewer resources.

In a side-by-side comparison of HUD2 and HUD3 server processes, Fonality found that HUD3 server is approximately 3x faster and consumes up to 40% fewer system resources.

Part of the savings come from the implementation of the Jabber protocol. Other savings come from re-writing Java objects that perform HUD functions.

The HUD3 engineering team re-wrote HUD from scratch. HUD3 took approximately 4 million lines of code and 18 months to complete.

Features

Moving past the visual similarities of HUD2 and HUD3, under the hood, HUD3 adds probably 50% more features and includes a brand-new version of HUD: HUD Queues

The full list of current HUD3 features can be viewed on our public website: http://pbxtra.fonality.com/products/hud/edition-comparison.html

The following table shows features affected by the change from HUD2 to HUD3.

Purple indicates a new feature of HUD3

Yellow indicates a previous feature of HUD2 which has been moved (from a free version of HUD2 to a paid version of HUD3)

/content/body/div[2]/p[6]/span, reference to undefined name 'google': line 1, column 1

MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptUndefinedNameException: reference to undefined name 'google': line 1, column 1
  at MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptVar.Evaluate (MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptEnv env) [0x00000] 
  at MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptAccess.Evaluate (MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptEnv env, Boolean evaluateProperties) [0x00000] 
  at MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptAccess.Evaluate (MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptEnv env) [0x00000] 
  at MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptCall.Evaluate (MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptEnv env) [0x00000] 
  at MindTouch.Deki.Script.Dom.DekiScriptDomExpr.Evaluate (MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptEvalContext context, System.Xml.XmlNode parent, MindTouch.Deki.Script.DekiScriptEnv env) [0x00000]

Changes to the feature-set of Personal Edition

Why isn't Outlook integration included with HUD3 PE?

Many customers have noticed the lack of Outlook integration in HUD3 Personal Edition (PE). HUD2 PE was free, and included Outlook integration for Outlook 2002-2003.

HUD3 PE does not include Outlook integration. Here's why:

Microsoft continues to change its libraries every quarter, and it is getting more and more expensive to be compatible with recent versions of their software. For this reason we simply could not give it away free anymore. Fonality required a dedicated team to make HUD3 work with Outlook 2007.

Why are the "call" options disabled in HUD3 PE?

Customers familiar with call status information on the Standard Edition of our product prior to HUD3 are recalling a product named HUDlite.

What's HUDlite?

HUDlite was a product created to bridge the gap between trixbox CE and Fonality's commercial product line. HUDlite included far more features than HUD2 PE. Most customers on our trixbox platform have experience with HUDlite and consider this product the "previous" version of HUD. When these customers upgrade to HUD3 PE, they notice major differences that are not consistent with an "upgrade".

The truth is that HUDlite, HUD2, and HUD3 are all fundamentally different products.

Customers who were using HUD2 PE and then upgraded the HUD3 PE would actually notice an increase in the feature-set between versions. But customers who were using HUDlite and switch to HUD3 PE will feel that features have been retracted.

Can I go back to HUD2?

Sure. Because HUD2 and HUD3 run on different architectures, you can run them side-by-side on your PBXtra and your computer.

It is not recommended to run both HUD applications simultaneously as each puts load on your server. The combined load can (not will) reduce the simultaneous call capacity of your server.

Within your Admin Panel, click on Options --> HUD
Set Enable HUD2 Server to "yes"
Click Apply All Changes
Navigate to http://app.fonality.com/hud/download.cgi in order to grab the HUD2 client (if you don't already have it!)
Install HUD2 client as you would any other application on your platform
Insert your web username and web password to login.