Details

1. General overview

The Phone Xpress system is used to collect information about phone calls made via a PBX (SMDR/CDR/SMDA messages), controlling, analyzing and pricing them in a quick and efficient way. Virtually each organization uses a private automatic branch exchange or PBX and has to solve the problem of minimizing expenses on communication. In large companies, such communicational expenses may amount to rather considerable sums and the use of this program will cut these expenses by 10-20%. The Phone Xpress system can be used to analyze how lines are loaded, control the calls of your personnel not related to their work, trace international and long-distance calls. This system can simultaneously work with several PBXs situated quite far from each other and all the information received from them will be stored in one database and, therefore, reports will be interrelated and valid for the entire enterprise. This feature can be interesting for large organizations with a lot of branches and affiliates.Practically all modern PBXs provide information about calls in the form of text messages via a serial port (it can be mentioned as a SMDR, SMDA or CDR port in PXB descriptions) or an Ethernet port. Such a message contains the following information about each call:

• external phone number;
• local phone number;
• dialed number;
• the data and time when the call was started call duration;
• etc.

The Phone Xpress system is a powerful and flexible tool for collecting, systematizing and analyzing this data.What benefits your enterprise gets from using the Phone Xpress system:

• registering all calls made via your PBX;
• storing information for any period of time;
• optimizing the use of local and external lines;
• distributing expenses on telephone communication between the divisions of your enterprise;
• tracing suspicious calls;
• verifying bills from telephone companies;
• generating various statistical reports and diagrams;
• accessing this information from any workstation.

2. System architecture

In the process of developing Phone Xpress, the so-called application server model was used. It provided the system with flexibility and indisputable advantages over similar systems (working with various databases, connecting remote modules via the local area network or the Internet, connecting an unlimited number of modules, etc.).The Phone Xpress system consists of the following modules:

• Phone Xpress Server– application server;
• Phone Xpress Recorder– call registration module;
• Phone Xpress Administrator– system configuration and administration module;
• Phone Xpress Analyzer – report generation module.

Figure 2 – System architectureThe TCP/IP protocol is used to send the information between the server and modules of the system. Thus, you can work with the system from any computer connected to the local area network or the Internet if the necessary system modules are installed on it.The system can save data to one of the listed SQL servers that can be accessed with the help of ODBC drivers. The system distribution package contains the FireBird SQL server (it is a variety of the Interbase SQL server). The system was tested with such SQL servers as:

• Microsoft SQL Server;
• Oracle;
• MySQL;
• InterBase (FireBird).

Actually, the system can work with any other SQL server (Sybase and others) that has an ODBC driver developed for it. We did not include these servers in our list only because we did not test the system with them. If you have successfully tested the system with any SQL server that is not on this list, please let us know about it and we will add it to our list.Phone Xpress Server – application server; This module processes requests from all other system modules connected to it via the local area network of the Internet using the TCP/IP protocol.Phone Xpress Recorder – call registration module; This module collects information from PBXs into one database. In case there is no connection to Phone Xpress Server, the information is saved locally to be sent to the server later.Phone Xpress Administrator – system configuration and administration module; This module is used both to configure the entire system and to give users rights to access each of the system modules.Phone Xpress Analyzer – report generation module. The powerful report generation module makes it possible to get any information and statistical data about the work of your PBX. The information can be presented in the form of both tables and diagrams. It is possible to export reports into various data formats.