What does it solve ?

Wazo aims to empower partners to customize the Wazo platform according to their business models, enabling them to add value for their end customers in ways that differentiate their products and services. Currently, this level of customization is difficult to achieve for several reasons—chief among them being that the user interface (UI) in the portal and end-user applications is 'hard-coded' and not easily editable by our enterprise clients. As a result, partners can only integrate Wazo functionality into external or adjacent software products using the Wazo API, or build data integrations, but they cannot directly modify Wazo itself.

Additionally, we need to offer our partners greater flexibility and responsiveness. Given our current development capacity, it can be challenging to meet every expectation, and the plugin framework will help address this by allowing partners to extend and customize Wazo more easily by themselves.

For Wazo, a rigid, non-pluggable implementation would also mean that unless we significantly narrow our focus on specific use cases, we risk being perpetually caught in a cycle of adding tweaks and functionalities to satisfy every partner’s unique needs—an unsustainable approach for building a platform that works for everyone.

Previously, while our stack allowed for the creation of new plugins to enhance the platform with additional features, and we've provide APIs to help developers create external features, it remained impossible for developers to add new features directly within our client application or portal without Wazo's involvement. This limitation prevented us and our partners from fully embracing the spirit of the project, which is to foster innovation and customization accross all our applications and services.