Metropolis Call Accounting
From Pbxnsip Wiki
Metropolis Technologies, Inc. has been a provider of call accounting software for businesses and the hospitality industry since 1993, with several thousand installations throughout the United States and North America. Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Metropolis Technologies, Inc. provides OfficeWatch Call Accounting for Business and ProfitWatch Hotel Call Accounting directly to end-users and select resellers globally. Website: http://metropolis.com/
Call accounting for small, medium, and Enterprise businesses
Call accounting for the hospitality market (hotels). Same fearures as OfficeWatch plus integration with Property Management Systems as needed by hotels
Integration with the pbxnsip IP-PBX
All PBX phone systems produce a Call Detail Record (CDR) when a call terminates. A basic record will generally contain the start time of the call (date/time), Called From number (extension), Called To number, and Call Duration (in seconds). The CDRs on a pbxnsip server can easily be viewed, but to collect and organize them in order to produce reports and call billing requires an external applicaion like the Metropolis Technologies OfficeWatch or ProfitWatch software. Setting up the pbxnsip IP-PBX to work with Metropolis is very simple and straight forward.
pbxnsip Setup to Pass CDRs to Metropolis
1. Begin by choosing the fields that you want incorporated into each CDR. You have to read and understand the "Simple CDR Format" page on the pbxnsip WIKI: http://wiki.pbxnsip.com/index.php/Simple_CDR_Format. The cdr_format field is store in the PBX.XML system file as shown below.
A common example of the cdr_format would look like "$w$5e$12c$5d". This would creaate CDRs with a format that looks like this example: "20071223123224 123 9781234567 120". The field '$w' is the time of the call, '$5e' is the 5 digit PBX extension, '$12c' is the 12 digit CallerID of the Remote Party, and the field '$5d' is the 5 digit call duration in seconds.
2. Creating or editing the cdr_format field is very easy. After logging into the PBX using the admin account, issue the following command from your browser:
http://<ip_address_of_server>/reg_settings.htm?save=save&cdr_format=<the CDR format you have chosen>
Example: http://192.168.0.213/reg_settings.htm?save=save&cdr_format=$w$5e$10c$5d
3. To point all CDRs to the Metropolis Call Accounting server, log back into the PBX using the Admin account, go to the Settings/General tab and edit the SOAP CDR URL: field. Enter the string 'cdr:ip address:ip port number' with the settings of the Metropolis server in mind. As an example, cdr:192.168.1.1:12000 will send CDRs to port 12000 on server 192.168.1.1. The PBX side is now set up...
Metropolis ProfitWatch Setup to accept pbxnsip CDRs
Prerequisites: Install the Metropolis software and have a good understanding of the product. Please see http://www.metropolis.com/index.html for more information, setup and support.
1. Within ProfitWatch, go to Setup/PBX, in the Receive data using: field, choose I.P. port (PBX sends data to IP port). Also enter the IP Listen Port. This should match the IP port number set on the PBX above (12000 in this example).
2. Use the DataSpy utility (also under the Settings menu) to view CDR records that have reached ProfitWatch:
3. Format the raw CDR records received by ProfitWatch by selecting the Modify PBX Settings from the Setup/PBX window. You will probably use this in conjunction with DataSpy.
4. Collect the call data and periodically run reports:
