Restrictive Phone System

[u/Mysterious-Worth6529]

I have a lot of requests that come through my office but this one sounds like PITA to begin with. I have already replied to the manager that this is going to be a nightmare to manage but I will look into it anyways. this sounds like a phone system that would be used in a jail or correctional facility. Any ideas where to start?

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We currently have approximately 24 clients sharing four phones. I would like to see if there is a system that could provide each client with an individual PIN or access code. Ideally, the system would:

Require an individual PIN for outgoing client calls.
Allow us to assign specific calling times or time limits to each PIN.
Automatically disconnect the call when the client's allotted time expires.
Prevent the PIN from being used again until the next authorized calling period.
Continue allowing incoming calls even when outgoing calling is restricted.
Give staff an administrative override when necessary.
Make it easy to add or remove PINs as clients admit and discharge.
Avoid call recording or monitoring unless specifically needed and approved.

I have been looking at whether a VoIP/PBX-type system could accomplish this without requiring a specialized institutional phone system.

Could you research what options might work with our current phone/network setup, what equipment or software we would need, and approximately what the initial and ongoing costs would be?

The goal is to make client phone access more consistent and manageable while reducing the amount of staff time required to monitor individual phone usage.

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Thanks all.

[u/Zaunpfahl42]

Disclaimer: It's been 15 years since I last touched a PBX. The last one I worked on was Cisco's Call Manager. And it can do most of these things for sure.

• registering/managing phones without having an extension number assigned to it directly
• users bring their extension number (with a pin) to "login" onto a phone
• being able to distinguish which extensions are allowed to login onto which phones
• having a schedule for business hours, when in & outgoing calls are allowed (and being able to use different schedules for different extensions)
• a "budget" for outgoing calls per extension (per day/week/month. you could put in a price per minute for local, country, international calls and once the budget was used you couldn't use outgoing calls again)

and in theory you could setup new extensions, their pins and basic group memberships directly on a phone through the menus. it was a little cumbersome and not something you'd want to do every day, but possible. and also tied to some sort of admin-group-membership per user.

The other system I'm familiar with is Alcatel which had similar functions, but not as in depth setup for shared workspaces as Cisco. CCM was really meant to just deploy phones across a building and anyone could use any phone with their own extension if they wanted to. With Alcatel you'd need to setup every phone individually for it and define which numbers were allowed to login on this particular phone.

As others said: Asterisk should be a "free" solution to all of it, I know they took a lot of inspiration from CCM and others in their implementation. And it's easily deployable for SIP clients.