International Calling

[campyracr]

I haven't found any posts on this yet, so here goes:

one of my legend sites wants to allow one line to make international calls. Furthermore they want to be able to track the time/date & duration of the calls for billing purposes.

I am thinking the allow/disallow would simply be an ARS table edit, however I am having trouble figuring out how to limit it to just one extension.

If there is a software package that does this, chances are we don't have it, but give it a shot anyway.

 

[GoKings]

Unfortunately, the Merlin is not a world-class routing switch (like the Definity). For international calling, it is pretty much all or nothing. You can restrict phones from being able to call internationally, but you cannot restrict by country code once you have allowed the station to dial internationally. As far as tracking the date, time and duration, most call accounting systems will do this for you. The call accounting system connects to the Merlin via the SMDR port on the processor. I don't particularly have any favorites in the call accounting arena, but Veramark (

http://www.veramark.com)

seemed to be a favorite of AT&T/Lucent/Avaya direct. Additionally, you referenced this as only one line needing this. I assume, by the word line, that you are referring to a telco line, not a station on the Merlin. If it is just 1 telco line, you can have the LEC put account codes on the line and they will track all of the calling for you on that line.

 

[campyracr]

So, I can enable the calling, and add the extension in question to a group that has access to that feature disallowing any other extension from using it? Is there a way for a user to circumvent this?

I would assume the Veramark software costs$$? Did I forget to mention they don't want to pay?

I did mean extension rather than telco line, however if I need to bypass the switch in order to accomplish the mission I will.

 

[GoKings]

Actually, by default, disallow list 7 should have 011 as one of the disallowed options. The programmer who installed should have added all stations in the system to disallow list 7, assuming that the standard toll fraud and international restrictions were applicable. To enable the phone to dial internationally, just remove it from disallow list 7.

In regards to users circumventing the restriction...toll fraud is a big $$$ scam. People can always find the loop holes in the system if they try hard enough.

Yes the Veramark software can cost, but it's not ridiculously expensive. However, you can have raw SMDR data print out from the SMDR port and if you spend a litlle time with it, you can actually make sense of it to the point where you can capture only the data you want and make the necessary reports yourself (kind of like your own little call accounting program). You will need a 355A or 355AF adapter to convert from the RJ45 SMDR port plug to DB25 that will connect to a PC com port to accomplish this.