Andrea Sonnino - 7 July, 2020 - 5 ’ read

Why Imagicle Call Recording is the best replacement for your Cisco Mediasense.

Cisco Jabber, Cisco Mediasense, End of Support, Imagicle Call Recording, Replacement Discount

Cisco MediaSense is gone.

As many of you know, Cisco Mediasense will go to End of Support next October. Again, as many of you know, this could be a problem for those who use this call recording solution daily and need to continue recording while not losing existing records.

Many have already started looking for a new solution, but perhaps not everyone knows that they will find a winner here.

I am Andrea Sonnino, Imagicle senior technical solution specialist, and today I will give you some good reason to choose to replace your Cisco Mediasense with Imagicle Call Recording.

Call Recording Solutions in the worldwide market.

Nowadays, there are several Call Recording solution vendors, compatible or certified with Cisco UC environments.

Most of the available flagship recording products are sold by companies who are actually developing call recording solution only, thus providing a very comprehensive solution including lots of features like:

audio&video recordings;
screen recording;
speech recognition, to allow keyword search within several recordings;
large scale concurrent recordings, thanks to dedicated high performance (also read “expensive”) hardware.

You should be aware that most of these solutions were developed several years ago, when “legacy” PBX was largely adopted, and VoIP was still a niche market. As a consequence, those vendors invested an awful amount of money in engineering hardware-based solutions to “sniff” voice calls directly from ISDN or analog twisted pair physical lines.

Now that VoIP is ruling worldwide, traditional Call Recording suppliers had to change their recording approach to an IP-based sniffing. In Cisco terms, that means SPAN lines recording. This is working just fine in a small-medium business scenario, with hundreds of concurrent recordings and dedicated hardware.

But you must be aware that SPAN lines recording is using a large amount of bandwidth in your corporate network, thus heavily interfering with other IP-based services.

Finally, most of the customers are now seeking for a multi-service UC platform and not for a Call Recording-only solution.

Few customers really need and use most of the above “rich” recording features but, whether you use them or not, you will have to pay if they are included in the solution.

The advantages of a global solution: Call Recording included in Imagicle UCX Suite.

Imagicle is offering its Call Recording application for Cisco UC environments since 2014, fully integrated into the flagship Imagicle UCX Suite solution.

This article is dedicated to Call Recording solutions, so I will briefly summarize the other applications included in the Imagicle UCX Suite:

Call Accounting and Billing
IP Fax Server
Directory services and Caller ID
Advanced Queuing
Attendant Console
IP Phones locking
Auto-Attendant Manager Enterprise
Voicemail and integrated messaging
Hospitality Services

Imagicle ApplicationSuite runs on any virtualization environment, using the latest Windows Server OS, and it does NOT require an actual, dedicated server appliance.

You can argue that the above apps are not related to a call recording solution. Well, as a matter of fact, they are massively influencing the decision to choose Imagicle against other vendors, and I’ll tell you why.

Ultimate audio recording technologies.

First of all, Imagicle Call Recording application embeds all the best and most recent audio recording technologies, based on Cisco proprietary protocols and multi-vendor standards:

Cisco Built-in Bridge (BiB) recording, with media forking from phones and from voice gateways;
automated, TAPI-based dial-in recording, for those phones not supporting BiB;
manual, free-seating dial-in conference, available to any device and IP-PBX environment;
SIPREC recording, supporting PSTN calls recording of any phone device, including analog phone sets. Available to any IP-PBX or media gateways supporting SIPREC standard.

You can seamlessly leverage all the above technologies, without any dedicated hardware and avoid old-fashioned IP sniffing methods, thus saving money and precious bandwidth.

The features that make the difference. Included for free.

You know that in the field of apps, details make all the difference in the world. And Imagicle Call Recording is a solution designed in every single detail to offer the user a great, easy, smart experience.

Here are some of the top features included by default into Imagicle Call Recording solution, mostly available as an optional add-on in other competitors’ solutions:

automatic and selective recording. You can mix’n’match the modes in your environment;
“Live keep” recording, where call recording is triggered any time by a softkey and whole conversation is saved from the start;
two independent recording storages: one with encrypted audio recordings and subjected to a configurable retention period; another for long-term archiving of unencrypted MP3 audio recordings;
feature to import unencrypted audio recordings from an existing recording system (e.g., MediaSense) to Imagicle Call Recording, together with relevant meta-data, and applying strong data encryption to comply with major security and worldwide privacy regulations;
fully web-based conditioned access to recorded conversations, with search&play tool and differentiated permission levels for standard users, supervisors, and administrators;
free Imagicle Gadgets, to integrate Call Recording search&play feature, start/stop and pause/resume buttons into Jabber and Finesse clients;
automatic privacy statement announcement, played for PSTN calls and for internal calls, leveraging Cisco CURRI and Agent Greeting technologies;
fully suitable with Smart Workers, accessing to Cisco infrastructure from remote (MRA/Expressway) or by leveraging Cisco SNR feature.;
REST APIs included to trigger recording and retrieve recorded conversations from any third-party application.

Why you should choose Imagicle Call Recording.

Now, let’s see why and how Imagicle wins against recording-only solutions vendors. Here are some interesting value-added features, exclusively available with Imagicle ApplicationSuite:

Customer service: with UCCX/UCCE, you can use Imagicle Call Recording to capture agent calls and make them available to supervisors. These operations can also be managed by Cisco Finesse thanks to the free Imagicle gadget.
Directories integration: thanks to Imagicle Advanced Directories when you are recording a conversation involving a remote party whose number is included in Imagicle directories, the relevant caller and company name are automatically associated with the recorded audio file, allowing to easily search for recordings by name/surname/company.
Workflow integration: several customers use third-party ERP/CRM applications, where consolidated and customized workflows are in place to optimize employees’ daily activities. Imagicle main scope is to promote and enhance work optimization: this is why we offer several integration options through our applications. One of these allows recording a conversation with a customer and retrieve the relevant recorded audio file using Imagicle APIs, then associating it to the relevant customer’s CRM entry or trouble ticket.

Get Imagicle Call Recording from your preferred Cisco partner.

Do you like our multi-service UC approach? I hope so!

You can browse our multi-language website for further details: http://www.imagicle.com

You can test all Imagicle apps for 30 days free of charge by downloading our Virtual Appliance from the same website.

And if you decide to purchase the licenses, you can opt for Imagicle SKUs available in Cisco GPL, or you can contact one of our worldwide partners to get a turn-key quotation, including installation and maintenance.

Please rely on Imagicle for any question or for any project involving our apps. We will be more than happy to assist you!

Ps. Stay tuned! The fantastic news included in the coming Summer Release 2020 will be out on the blog in the coming weeks!

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