The standard Call Recording facilities provided with IP Office and Voicemail Pro can be extended further by using IP Office ContactStore. IP Office ContactStore stores and catalogs recordings so that they are easily accessible for later retrieval. Any recordings that you instruct Voicemail Pro to “send to the Voice Recording Library” are placed in a database.

IP Office ContactStore is provided with the Voicemail Pro software CD set and has an inbuilt 45 day trial license. A fully featured IP Office ContactStore system can be installed and used for 45 days from the creation of the first recording. After this time the system will stop taking recordings until a license is purchased and installed onto the IP Office.

IP Office ContactStore has a number of components, these are:

   • An MSDE database into which details of all recorded calls are inserted.
   • A browser-based call search and replay application.
   • A browser-based system configuration and status monitoring application.
   • Disk space management - Oldest recordings are automatically deleted as needed.
   • Optional archive management - Recordings are automatically written to a DVD +RW drive.

Recordings within IP Office ContactStore are stored as .WAV files. IP Office ContactStore uses the G.726 16kbps ADPCM compression standard, which provides the best compromise between storage capacity and CPU loading.

IP Office ContactStore is designed to perform compression as a background task, which does not impact the systems ability to record, search or play other calls. It takes approximately 1 minute to compress a two hour recording. The compressed recordings are stored as 16kbps G.726 format, storage requirements are therefore 8MBs per hour of recording.

To allow you to search for calls easily, the details of the recordings are stored within a MSDE database. It contains one record for each call recorded and additional records for each party on the call and the owner of the call. The information that is held for any recording is:

   • A unique reference for the recording
   • The start date and time
   • The duration of the recording
   • The name and number of the parties on the call—where this was available to IP Office (through ANI, Caller ID or DNIS) at the time of the call.
   • The direction of the call (incoming, outgoing, or internal)
   • The owner of the call recording
   • The target or dialled number, which may be different from the number that actually took the call.

The IP Office ContactStore suite can be installed onto the same server as Voicemail Pro but must be loaded onto a separate partition. Alternatively, IP Office ContactStore can be installed on a separate drive within the same server or on a separate server. The minimum PC specification when Voicemail Pro and IP Office ContactStore are installed on the same server is detailed in the Voicemail System requirements later in this chapter. IP Office ContactStore stores recorded calls with certain security in place.

Access to recordings is strictly controlled according to the security constraints configured within the System Administration pages. Each recording has an owner; the call owner is the number of the extension that recorded the call. You can specify to which extensions each user has replay rights; the user can search for and replay all calls “owned” by those stations. Typically an individual may be given rights to replay calls owned by their extension number while managers may have rights to the extension numbers of all of their staff.

The system will automatically generate alarms showing system warnings. Alarms are logged to IP Office ContactStore's database and held for a month before being purged. The administrator can define specific Email addresses for alarms to be automatically forwarded to. The email recipient could be a local system administrator, a manned help-desk and/or suppliers' support desks if you have a support agreement that includes this facility. The system sends an email message each time an alarm occurs or is cleared. It also sends an email once per day as a "heartbeat" to let you know it is still operating. Failure to receive the daily heartbeat message should be investigated; it could indicate that the server has failed.

IP Office ContactStore allows replay of recordings by means of a browser-based application that is accessible with Internet Explorer (IE) V5.0 and higher. The Search and Replay facilities include the following features:

   • Personal security restrictions. The restrictions are applied as you log into the web server.
   • Criteria-based search filter fields to perform specific searches.
   • Replay controls. Use the replay controls to start, stop, pause, skip forward, skip backward, or to export the recording to a readily playable .WAV file.
   • Audio waveform display. The waveform presents a graphic representation of the audio content of the call. Use the waveform to avoid replaying static or silences, and to move easily to specific portions of a call.