How to Record CUCM (CallManager) Calls

CUCM call recording is one of the most popular topics in the world of Cisco Unified Communications. For companies that deployed Cisco Unified Communications Manager there are several approaches to phone call recording offered by a dozen of Cisco Solution Partners.

Which one to choose and why? Let’s consider briefly.

Call Recording Methods
SPAN-based recording (“passive recording”) – is one of the oldest methods of CUCM voice recording. This type of recording software connects to the SPAN (Switched Port Analyzer) port to monitor all network (or VLAN only) traffic and pick out the VoIP packets to store them as audio files.
Built-in Bridge recording (“BIB recording”) – is the approach that uses the conference bridge embedded in almost each Cisco IP phone (and Cisco Jabber for Windows as well). With the proper CUCM configuration a Cisco IP phone forks the phone call audio streams to the CUCM recording software that mixes these streams and saves to the audio file.
In the beginning of 2011 Cisco introduced its own recording platform Cisco MediaSense. This solution records audio streams forked by Cisco IP Phones (BIB-recording) or (this is important!) Cisco ISR routers.

Why is it important? Along with Cisco MediaSense Cisco released the new IOS ( Cisco ISR router firmware) that supports the media forking capability. Supplied with this feature, the Cisco gateway can fork the media of conversations to the recording server.

Which leads us to the 3rd method:

CUBE recording – the same as BIB-recording, but the media is forked by Cisco CUBE (the software that runs on Cisco ISR router). If Cisco MediaSense can receive and store forked audio streams, why 3rd party recorders cannot?
So, what method to use and which solution to choose for Cisco CallManager recording?