Telephone Management - Its Component Parts

This article deals with the nut and bolts of a telephone management service; it provides an overview of the components that comprise a system.

A summary of terms:

A call record: a definition of a CDR

Data Acquisition - The process of collecting the CDR from the PBX and delivering them to the host telephone management application

Mediation - When the CDR arrives at the host application it is placed into a database.

Call costing: apply a cost to the telephone call

Reporting: create reports from the call record data Alarms: when things go wrong

CDR ' The CDR is the raw material used for reports, it contains such information as the extension number that dialed the call, the time and date, the telephone number dialed. It is also referred to as 'call record' or 'SMDR' (Station Message Data Record)

A Call Record sometimes know as a CDR, (Call Data Record) or SMDR, (Station Message Data Record) contains information about a particular telephone call.The record contains information such as the date, time, duration, number dialed, originating extension and terminating trunk line. This is the "raw material" we use for reports.

CDR formats vary between manufacturers and can contain much more information, for example the number of the calling party on incoming calls, call transfer information, and account and PIN numbers.

They can vary in length with some as long as 300 characters and others just 70. Internal, outgoing and incoming call records can be entirely different layouts. This often presents challenge for the telephone management provider especially as there are no standards, each PBX company have proprietary formats that vary from model to model and even between versions.

Data collection

Data Acquisition presents major technical challenges and is in fact a separate technology. The process of acquiring the CDR from the PBX and safely delivering them to the application is a specialized business. Most PBX systems have limited or no CDR storage capacity, there are a few exceptions, usually server based PBX where CDR's are sored in file, but generally PBX like to output the call record immediately after creation. To accommodate this, normal practice is to use a device external to the PBX to receive call records, store and forward them to the host application. This device is often called a "Call Buffer' or more generically, a 'Data Collection Device'.

Mediation

Call records are of a proprietary format and therefore must be "reshaped" into a standard format before insertion into a database. This process often requires the installation technician to set up a specific format within the Telephone Management packages, some service providers do this automatically.

Call Tariffs

An essential function of the telephone Management service is to apply a cost to each call. Duplicating Telco rate tables is often no small feat. Some have as many as 5000 sets of dialed digits relating to 200 different tariffs. Some are a great deal simpler, and can be set up by the installation technician. Some systems offer standard tariff for a country and allow the user to modify those settings for local conditions and special discounts.

Reporting

The purpose of the Telephone Management service is to produce readable and accurate reports to help you manager your telecoms environment.

Alarms

When things go wrong you need to know about it. For example, your PBX may have stopped creating call records and you do not want to wait until you run a report to find a problem occurred weeks ago and there is no data. Therefore your Telephone Management system should give alarms under circumstances that may require intervention.

These are the component parts of a service, each supplier may have advantages in one area or another, overall which is best? - this is for the buyer to decide.