Avaya VOIP Phones and recording 1

[Zowwie438]

Has anyone utilized the RTF or RTP stream that the 46XX series phones are capable of sending out?

We currently have a vendor product to record calls and it relies on line side T1's and can't record all of our calls at once.

I was thinking about building a server based application that would accept all these RTP streams from the various devices in our company and then convert them over to MP3.

Basically... I would have one server as the receiver and he would hand it off to another server for converting and/or transcript evaluation (speech to text) and then finally to a common server where people could access telephone recordings via the web.

If anyone has built something similar, please share with me your trials and issues that you faced.

Thanks,

Zowwie

 

[nohuhu]

Zowwie438,

no need to make it so complicated. why don't you just use existing recording solutions available on the market? i would personally recommend nice perform but witness impact 360 is also a good solution.

 

[Zowwie438]

The thought is not to make it complicated, the tought is to make it cheaper and bring as many vendor costs internal that we can.

I understand that there are outside solutions, but if the phone has the capability of sending out a standard RTP audio stream... It's pretty simple to convert it to mp3, the only downfall is that it's labor intensive.

In addition... If we create it in house, it provides us the ability to re-sell the simplistic solution to other companies and boost our stock holders interest in our company.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[nohuhu]

Zowwie438,

huh. well it's your call but do mind that developing call recording solutions may be a little bit more complicated task than you think. as for rtp send-out capability, i don't fancy such method for call recording. it is suitable only for ip phones and i think only for 46xx series (i'm not sure about 96xx and have strong doubts about 16xx), no digital/analog/whatever, and it's a maintenance and security headache for any but very small companies. and it also does need cti to get call related information. there is an alternative solution for avaya switches, it's their cmapi (now dmcc) sdk for developing softphones. you get the idea: your recording application registers its extensions on the switch via cmapi and then uses service observing or single step conferencing to get a copy of voice path. it is pretty inexpensive (if you know how to order it right way however it also requires aes server and is really compatible to cm3+ only. you may try to use it with cm2 but it is complicated and unstable. but for newer version switches it works like charm. i'm not saying that this is The Only Right Way To Do It, recording method selection depends heavily on many factors but from my own understanding of development complexities cmapi is the easiest way to achieve results. that's why it is used by both nice and witness in their recording solutions.
but it would be curious to see anyone using ip phones rtp send-out successfully. if you will be able to develop a good simple product i may consider selling it here on domestic market, there's a strong demand for easy, compact and simple (and cheap too voip recording solutions out there.

 

[Zowwie438]

Yeah... I am WAY too familiar with stand alone applications that perform single step conferencing onto our calls as that is what we use today.

There are many options available to me... But since the goal of our company is to migrate everyone off TDM phones and get them onto 46XX and/or softphones... It just appeared appropriate to simply accept the RTP stream from those entities.

As far as selling items... Our company is public traded and although most of our in-house development on services our needs... We do have many different solutions that we are considering to expose to the public for sale.

Some of them are:
911 notification for large corporations. We can send emails, SMS and dial phones of internal security staff whenever a desk calls 911. Today, most 911 centers only receive the trunk number of the outbound line and they can only associate the 911 call to the building... Not the specific desk or employee.

I am aware that the PBX allows a printer to be installed for such instaces... But in large corporations like ours with mutiple locations (even our of state) that all link back to the same PBX... It's difficult to properly direct the authorities to the location.

Our solution will provide internal security staff the name/desk/phone of the person who dialed 911 as well as the supervisors name/desk/phone.

VOIP Recording is also on my plate as well.. I want to create a simplistic solution that doesn't require dialogic boards, line side T1's and the consumption of a conference party. Something more dynamic with less resources and costs.

Help Desks... We have already invested tons of work into our internal help desk development. Complete with smart routing based on customer records and caching all the data so at the time of answer... The agent can see ALL of the customer info within 200ms! Even remote data from devices located at the customers home.

I'll let u know what the PBX team comes back with.

Take care.

--Zowwie

 

[gonzalez]

There is a product made by Telrex that does what you are wanting to do. It utilizes an AES server using TSAPI basic.It monitors only unencrypted IP traffic going thru the gateway. It is a pretty slick product and considerably cheaper than Nice or Witness.

 

[gonzalez]

PS. The only downside to the product I mentioned above is it monitors traffic by IP address so you have to have static IP address's for the phones you are monitoring.

 

[Zowwie438]

gonzalez,

It's funny that you mentioned that product! I was talking to our team lead yesterday about following the above advise and just implimenting a firewall solution as a middle man like attack solution.

Basically, we would insert a firewall that would route all VOIP data packets to another server while allowing them to pass through to the original destination.

With Linux firewalls... This is a very simple thing to do and doesn't require a great amount of resources. This in combination with my TSAPI knowledge could yield us some very favorable results with little cost.

I think I may set something up on my desk with Asterisk as a test bed to see how it functions.

Thanks for the link to their site... It was very interesting.

--Zowwie

 

[gonzalez]

Zowwie438,

The way the Tel REX product monitors the traffic is by mirroring the port the gateway is on and you wont need a firewall.

 

[BuckWeet]

Have you thought about the additional resrouces needed to make this happen on your network?? What you're asking to do is duplicate the RTP stream..

Maybe you have all IP phones LAN environment where this is easily possible.. but in a WAN this is not..

 

[rwalsh79]

Truly, NICE has a pretty good IP CLS/logger product out.