GoAutoDial CE 4.0 shipped in 2019 with VICIdial 2.14 underneath — SVN revisions somewhere around 2900-3200. The current VICIdial trunk sits at 3939+. That's six years of security patches, PHP 8 compatibility, WebRTC improvements, two-factor auth, and ConfBridge support that GoAutoDial CE never picked up.
If you're still running GoAutoDial, you're running a contact center on a platform that's been frozen in time while VICIdial kept moving. The GoAutoDial team shifted to their hosted Cloud product and effectively abandoned the self-hosted Community Edition.
The good news: migrating is easier than you'd expect, because GoAutoDial is VICIdial underneath.
GoAutoDial Is Just a Skin
This is the part most people don't realize until they look under the hood. GoAutoDial is not a separate dialer. It's VICIdial with a custom PHP frontend at /goautodial/ reading from and writing to the same MySQL asterisk database.
Your campaigns, lists, leads, agents, carriers, recordings, and CDR are already in VICIdial-format tables. The go_* and goautodial_* tables store GUI preferences and sessions — stuff the GoAutoDial interface needs but VICIdial doesn't.
Migrating isn't converting between two systems. It's upgrading the same system and removing a deprecated layer.
Why Leave Now
Security. GoAutoDial CE runs on CentOS 7, which hit end-of-life in June 2024. No security patches, no kernel updates, no TLS library updates. The GoAutoDial GUI itself adds attack surface — its own auth system, session management, and database access patterns on top of VICIdial's.
Feature gap. VICIdial's trunk now includes ViciPhone v3.0 WebRTC, STIR/SHAKEN awareness, PHP 8 support, improved AMD routing, new API endpoints, and ConfBridge. None of this is available in GoAutoDial CE without manually updating VICIdial underneath, which risks breaking the GoAutoDial GUI.
Dual-interface confusion. Settings changed in GoAutoDial's GUI sometimes don't propagate to VICIdial's tables. Settings changed in VICIdial's admin aren't always reflected in GoAutoDial. Troubleshooting means checking two interfaces, and GoAutoDial's documentation is sparse.
The Migration: Fresh Install, Data Import
Do not attempt an in-place upgrade. Install ViciBox 12 on fresh hardware, export your data from GoAutoDial, and import it into the new system.
Export the core tables from your GoAutoDial server using mysqldump with --no-create-info — the new ViciBox install already has the correct schemas. Export vicidial_campaigns, vicidial_lists, vicidial_list, vicidial_users, vicidial_user_groups, vicidial_server_carriers, vicidial_inbound_groups, vicidial_scripts, vicidial_dnc, and your log tables.
Import in dependency order on the new server: user groups before users, campaigns before campaign statuses, lists before leads. After import, update server_ip references from the old IP to the new one in vicidial_campaigns, vicidial_server_carriers, and vicidial_servers.
Reconfigure carriers through the VICIdial admin — verify SIP credentials, update IPs, reload Asterisk, and confirm registration. If you're moving from SIP to PJSIP (recommended), convert your trunk configs.
Transfer recordings with rsync. Start early — this can take days on large operations. Rsync handles incremental updates, so run it before and during the migration window.
Agent Transition
The core workflow doesn't change: login, wait for call, talk, disposition, repeat. Disposition codes carry over. Callbacks carry over. Scripts carry over.
What changes is the layout and styling. VICIdial's default agent screen is more utilitarian. Most operations fix this with CSS overrides. The visual gap between a customized VICIdial agent screen and GoAutoDial's panel is minimal.
Expect a 10-20% productivity dip on day one. It recovers by day 2-3. Have a team lead available for the first few hours to walk agents through the new interface.
Keep Your Rollback
Don't decommission the GoAutoDial server until the new VICIdial system has been stable for a full business week. Keep the old server's SIP registrations intact but inactive. If something goes wrong, re-register with your carrier and point agents back. The rollback window is practical for about 7 days — after that, new data accumulates on the VICIdial server and becomes hard to merge back.
For the complete walkthrough including SQL scripts and carrier coordination, see the full migration guide.
Originally published at https://vicistack.com/blog/goautodial-to-vicidial-migration/
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