Phone System based recording solutions

The phone system is the ideal place to record calls since the phone system has the most information about a call. But only few phone systems offer call recording, since only a fraction of users will have a need for it. Some phone systems can re-route calls to a specific port, which can then be connected to an external recorder. Others include the recorder inside the phone system. The software to manage recorded calls is often not very comfortable. The recording solution is phone system dependent and can not later be reused on a different phone system.

Diagram: PBX based recording

Advantages

  • Central recording with full information about caller and called party.
  • No additional hardware is necessary.
  • Both internal and external calls of all extensions could potentially be recorded.

Disadvantages

  • Typically the call recording extension/license for a phone system is quite expensive and not available for each phone system.
  • The software to manage the recordings is typically not very advanced, since this is not the core business of the phone system vendor.
  • The capacity of an internal recorder system is often limited to a certain number of channels/simultaneous calls.
  • Storage capacity inside a phone system may very well be limited.