Enterprise Recording Fundamentals

Call recording software records telephone conversations over PSTN or VoIP in a digital audio file format. Call recording is distinct from call logging and tracking, which record details about the call but not the conversation; however, software may include both recording and logging functionality.

Call recording is becoming increasingly important, with technology changing and working habits becoming more mobile. Addressing mobile recording is now the subject of many financial regulators’ recommendations. It is also increasingly important to business continuity planning, especially for pandemic planning.

Digital lines cannot be recorded unless the call recording system can capture and decode the proprietary digital signalling, which some modern systems can. Sometimes a method is supplied with a digital private branch exchange (PBX) that can process the proprietary signal (usually a conversion box) before being channeled to a computer for recording. Alternatively a hardware adapter can be used on a telephone handset as the digital signal is converted at that point to analogue.

VoIP Recording is usually restricted to streaming media recorders or software developed by the softphone or IP PBX creator. There are also solutions which use packet capture technology to passively record VoIP phone calls on the LAN.

Hardware is required to make the voice signal available to the computer equipment. Some of today’s call recording software is sold as a turn-key solution with hardware.

A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture or a screen recording, often containing audio narration. The term screencast compares with the related term screenshot; whereas screenshot generates a single picture of a computer screen, a screencast is essentially a movie of the changes over time that a user sees on a computer screen, that can be enhanced with audio narration and captions.

Screencasts can help demonstrate and teach the use of software features. Creating a screencast helps software developers show off their work. Educators may also use screencasts as another means of integrating technology into the curriculum. Students can record video and audio as they demonstrate the proper procedure to solve a problem on an interactive whiteboard.

Screencasts are useful tools for ordinary software users as well: They help filing report bugs in which the screencasts take the place of potentially unclear written explanations; they help showing others how a given task is accomplished in a specific software environment.

Organizers of seminars may choose to routinely record complete seminars and make them available to all attendees for future reference and/or sell these recordings to people who cannot afford the fee of the live seminar or do not have the time to attend it. This will generate an additional revenue stream for the organizers and makes the knowledge available to a broader audience.

This strategy of recording seminars is already widely used in fields where using a simple video camera or audio recorder is insufficient to make a useful recording of a seminar. Computer-related seminars need high quality and easily readable recordings of screen contents which is usually not achieved by a video camera that records the desktop.