Court Ticket and Payment system

[redjim]

I am working on a contract for a court in Arkansas.
We are looking to have a system that allows for customers/defendants to call in and get bilingual service.
1. Find out court dates
2. Find out fine payment amounts and dates
3. Pay traffic fines with credit card.
4. Receive condition information based on traffic violations.(i.e. IF you take Defensive Driving, your speeding ticket will be off your record in 12 months if you don't get another moving violation)

It looks like customer verification, billing ,and credit card payments are mostly what we need, while pulling the account information from a database.

I have done asterisk/voip work in Mexico. Mostly setting up systems, with very little programming.

Does anyone have any suggestions (links) to where I could find more information on setting something like this up?

I am going to at least try to setup a little demo for these guys in the next week or two.
Thanks, James

 

[wardmundy]

Interesting project. I don't think you'd want to tackle it unless you have a good bit of database experience. Would you be creating your own databases or using their backend databases? If theirs, what are they? Hope they have lots of development money.

 

[GregKeys]

Wow.....
I am a database programmer, and I would not tackle a demo with less than 1 month to work on it. That would be with the understanding that the demo was only a proof of concept. I would forecast out another 3 months to production. That is based on the a working assumption that they already have the database in existence and all I have to do on my plate is develop the hooks into it.

I am not trying to discourage you, rather, I want to impress on you that this is not a small undertaking. This project (PIAF) is a good example. Ward, how long did it take you guys to put out 1.0? Keep in mind James, if Ward answers this question, that all they were doing was taking EXISTING stuff (Centos, Asterisk, FreePBX, etc) and bundling it up into a clean easy install.

Greg Keys

 

[wardmundy]

Rather than PBX in a Flash, I'm thinking back to my courthouse days. I built a simple case management and noticing system for the bankruptcy courts in about three months (working day and night on it!). This may turn out to me more complicated than that. But it would be fun... once their check cleared. You might suggest that they approach the National Center for State Courts and seek a grant. It could have broader application in other courts around the country.

 

[redjim]

courts have database

These guys have a database. I spoke with the developer briefly the other day. I can't believe that I didn't write down what they are using for database. It is a as/400 system.

I would basically be looking to connect to what they already have.

I really appreciate Ward's suggestion to get in touch with the national center for state courts.

When I wrote "demo", I really meant proof of concept. I do appreciate you giving me some ideas on the time frame.

As Ward knows, misdemeanor courts spend a ton of time answering the same question about 2000 times a day.

-James

 

[jroper]

Hi

Ward, how long did it take you guys to put out 1.0?

It took me about 4 days of hard graft, and a lot of whisky to modify the concordiax iso to become the PiaF ISO and make it use asterisk 1.4, but months to get the Concordiax ISO working the year before!

Asterisk does Mysql quite well in the asterisk dial plan, I just done a couple of asterisk to remote database jobs.

Fortunately in both cases, the information was relatively static, and it was only a case broadcasting information via IVR, not updating the remote database to any degree.

So the architecture of dumping the contents of the local database every morning and getting the information from the remote database into the local MySQL database via a shell script each morning worked very well , with no possibility of damaging the source data in any way.

The I used apstel to sort out all the syntax and create the IVR's reading from the database.

Joe