Fortress Communicator has nine tabs along the bottom of the screen. Each one is a self-contained piece of the product, and knowing what belongs in which tab will save you a lot of searching. Here is the tour.
Dialer
This is where you place calls. Type a number on the keypad and tap the green call button. Two flavors of call land here:
- In-network calls between two Fortress users. These are always end-to-end encrypted; the audio is opaque to our servers. Cost: free, on every tier.
- PSTN calls — anything that touches a real phone number on a carrier. Available on Basic and above. Audio is encrypted on the leg between you and our PBX, but the leg between our PBX and the other party is plain phone audio because that is how the phone network works.
Holding down a digit dials your speed-dials. Letters are supported (a vanity number like 1-800-FLOWERS dials correctly). Tapping the avatar of a recent contact at the top of the dialer calls them back without retyping.
Directory
Your team’s address book. Every Fortress user in your organization (or the people you have chosen to connect with on a personal account) appears here, with their photo, extension, and whether they are currently online. Tap a contact to start a call, send a message, or open Private Chat.
On B2B plans (Team, Business, Enterprise) the Directory is populated automatically by your Plan Owner — every seat in the organization appears here. On personal plans the Directory is smaller, built from people you have explicitly added.
Recents
Call history. Every inbound, outbound, and missed call is logged here with date, time, duration, and the security state (green / yellow / orange) the call was in when it ended. Tap a row to call back; swipe left to delete the entry.
Common gotcha: a missed call from a number you do not recognize may be a spam call that our anti-spam system already blocked at the network edge. If you see a missed-call entry with no voicemail, that is usually what happened.
Messages
SMS and MMS — texts to and from regular phone numbers, the same kind of message your phone’s stock Messages app sends. Available on Basic and above. Each conversation thread groups messages with one phone number; tap to read, reply, or attach a photo. Photos and videos travel as MMS, which uses a separate bundle allotment from plain SMS.
If you are messaging another Fortress user, consider Private Chat instead — it is end-to-end encrypted and free.
Groups
Group SMS and MMS conversations — three or more participants on regular phone numbers. The same network as the Messages tab, just with multiple recipients. Like one-to-one SMS, this consumes your SMS/MMS bundle.
Private Chat
End-to-end encrypted, in-network messaging between Fortress users. The lock-shield icon and the green banner at the top of every Private Chat thread are how you know you are in this mode and not in plain SMS. Private Chat is free on every tier.
You can have one-to-one Private Chats or group Private Chats. Messages are delivered in real time over our SignalR channel; our servers see ciphertext only. See Using Private Chat for the full story.
Voicemail
Inbound calls you did not answer go here. We transcribe every voicemail using on-device or server-side speech recognition so you can read the message before deciding whether to play it. Tap any voicemail to play the audio, copy the transcript, call the sender back, or delete the message.
Voicemails are stored encrypted at rest and are deleted when you delete them on your phone — there is no separate server-side retention window beyond what you control.
Video
This tab is the home for video meetings. The current release uses video room links: somebody sends you a Fortress video link (over Private Chat, Messages, email, or a calendar invite) and tapping it opens the room. The full native video-room join experience is on the roadmap.
Until then, video links work on iOS, on Android (via the browser fallback), and on any desktop with a modern browser.
Settings
The control panel. Here you can:
- Manage your subscription — change tier, view renewal date, see how many minutes/SMS/MMS you have left in this billing period.
- Toggle security options — for example, set calls to require verified safety numbers before connecting.
- Configure Advanced setup — extension switch, tenant routing, SIP debug logs (for the rare case our support team asks you to enable them).
- Run diagnostics — a one-tap report that captures network conditions, registration state, and recent call SIP traces. You can email the result to support if you are debugging a call-quality issue.
- Review the Terms of Service, the privacy policy, and the version and build numbers.
- Sign out, which clears the account from this device only.
This is exactly what I needed to send to our new intake deputies — half of them didn’t even know the Groups tab existed, let alone how to use it. Quick question: does the guide cover how to set up restricted calling groups for high-risk inmates, or is that handled on the admin side separately?
This is exactly the kind of reference we needed — we had three new COs last month who kept getting lost between the Groups tab and Private Chat when coordinating shift handoffs. Bookmarking this for our onboarding folder. One question though: does the video walk through how permissions interact with the Settings tab, or is that covered separately?
This is exactly the kind of walkthrough our newer deputies needed — we had a lot of confusion around the difference between Groups and Private Chat, and this clears it up nicely. One question though: does the Recents tab log both incoming and outgoing calls, or just outgoing? We’ve had some discrepancies during incident reviews and I want to make sure we’re pulling complete records from the right place.
This is exactly what I needed to forward to our new intake staff — they always ask about the difference between Groups and Private Chat and I never have a clean answer ready. Bookmarking this for onboarding. One question though: does the Recents tab log video calls separately or does it lump them in with voice calls?
This is exactly what I needed to forward to our newer deputies who keep asking where things are in Fortress. Quick question though — does the Groups tab allow you to set up department-specific groups, or is that something only an admin can configure on the backend?
This is exactly what I needed to hand off to my newer officers who kept skipping over the Groups and Private Chat tabs entirely. One thing I’m still fuzzy on though — does the Voicemail tab pull in messages from external lines or only internal facility extensions? Would love a follow-up on that.