TSAPI/Monitor Stations 1

[cain06]

Hi, does anyone have any experience using TSAPI with the Avaya? We are on an S8500 PBX and would like to enable the ability to monitor every station and see what calls they are on. The possible ways we can see to do this are:

1. AES/CMAPI
2. AES/TSAPI (cheaper?)

Is this possible using TSAPI or CMAPI?

 

[nohuhu]

cain06,

it depends on what exactly you need to do. what do you mean as "monitor every station"? do you need to record the voice conversations or just track what calls were made and received on all the stations? if you need recording, take a look at industrial solutions like witness or nice, if not, i think you can go by with plain cdr.

 

[cain06]

We won't need to do audio recording - but we may need to do call control and this will have to be real-time. I'm looking at TSAPI and CVLAN.

 

[nohuhu]

cain06,

then the choice depends on what you exactly need. tsapi is easier to implement, cvlan offers more options. please describe your task in more detail.

 

[cain06]

dwalin - thanks again for all your help.

The task is as follows - we provide software which monitors agents on a phone to make sure they are doing their job. We need basically need to see the calls that they are on and monitor how long they've been on them.

The client wants to use our user interface so we need to work something out to provide our software on the avaya.

The basic info our application needs is:

1. Monitor individual phones and see active calls.
2. Duration of the call and call information (e.g. dialed #) - we can track duration if we get events as to start/end of call.

Down the road the client may want to have some call control capabilities such as predictive automated dialing per agent, so we don't want to start with one protocol and find it doesn't do what we need in the future.

 

[nohuhu]

cain06,

well, in this case i think both tsapi and cvlan can do. choose what would be easier for you to implement. the architectural difference is simple: cvlan is server-server protocol and tsapi is client-server one. in your case i think cvlan is more adequate.

 

[Cti4all]

Your question is not whether TSAPI or CVLAN is the way to go, rather can you use CMAPI?

CM API is first party control and provides limited data about calls. It is primarily a way to write softphone and IP media applications. I suspect you would not find the call details you are looking for in this API.

TSAPI allows a richer set of data, including the ability to collect digits by monitoring VDNs. CMAPI is also more expensive a $200 per station monitor vs $40 for TSAPI Basic RTU.

Both TSAPI (JTapi) and CMAPI offer Java clients allowing cross platform development. TSAPI also offers C/C++ client interfaces.

Typically, TSAPI can handle more client connections directly without the need for an additional server. CVLAN typically uses an application server for client connections, and CVLAN on AES for the app server to connect to. TSAPI can handle 1000+ direct client connections, thus eliminating another server.