Call Recording: The good, the bad, the ugly

Ahh Call-recording, its a feature many customers ask me about so I thought I would briefly speak about it here.

Just before we go on any further, I think I ought to mention the legal requirements surrounding call recording. First we shall look at a legal definition of call recording:

"Recording a call

Recording is the physical act of making a recording; monitoring is the listening to a call when being made or later."

Now lets look at the legal requirements for making a call recording:

“Every reasonable effort is made to inform parties that recording or monitoring is taking place.”

So in other words, you MUST inform the calling party that they may be recorded and/or are being recorded.

The Data Protection Act of 1998 also specifies that you must treat these recordings like any other form of private data stored electronically.

So now we have that out of the way and you understand your legal requirements, what kind of call-recording can we offer?

First of all, Later versions of Cisco Unity Express, Most versions of Cisco Unity Connection and Cisco Unity come with a feature called "Live Record." This rather handy feature allows a user to "conference" in the live-record pilot number, a beep will then sound indicating that the live-record feature has started, and the resulting .wav file will be placed in the users voicemail box after the call is complete.

SPAN is another method of configuring recording but is much more difficult to do, the idea behind this is to catch the RTP stream using port-mirroring. This requires more than just call-manager software however to execute and recording cannot be performed "on-demand" by the end user.

The final option is the use of third party software, to be totally honest I have not completely looked into this option as yet but I had a very interesting email from a company called Red Box who develop a voice-recording app. I will be investigating over the week and will let you know my findings.

Cheers
Pete
CCIE #18371