Campaign for real numbers update

Powershell to fix phone number formats (part 1)

James O'Neill's blog — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:48:10 GMT

Peter sent me a mail last week suggesting a blog post. "You mentioned in http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2007/02/21/the-campaign-for-real-numbers.aspx

Why I am the one doing this ?

James O'Neill's blog — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 08:51:50 GMT

A draft post which ended up going on the spike referred to Lyn Truss's book "Talk to the Hand: the utter

Trains, planes and automobiles.

James O'Neill's blog — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 16:12:42 GMT

The last person I punched was a schoolboy. Before you report me for child cruelty, I should point out

re: Campaign for real numbers update

James ONeill — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 18:38:25 GMT

Dear Numpty.

(1) Based on the numbers I see it's about 5% of people who can't write a number correctly.

(2) True.

(3) It affects every device and a lot of humans. Not just PCs, or Microsoft devices. Send a Nokia or Blackberry a +44 (0) 118 909 3080 they can't call it. Store a number in E.164 format in *ANY* mobile's phone book and you call it at home or while roaming. Put the zero in you can't call it anywhere.

Americans put the area code in brackets, so any American seeing +44 (0) 118 etc will dial the zero. So you're writing something to include the international code but in a way that foreigners can't call you. That's the behaviour of a numpty. (note the T).

(4) I said that the fix was to programatically clean directories.

(0) Is not a De facto standard, because most people in the world don't understand it. Every person who *DOES* understand it also understands how to dial a correctly formatted number.

On the other hand E.164 isn't obscure because (a) Is built into about a billion cell phones.

(b) It's how every PBX works.

re: Campaign for real numbers update

N. Umpy — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 09:43:19 GMT

So, let's see if I understand this situation.

1. Quite a lot of people write their phone numbers in the +44 (0) format

2. +44 (0) numbers aren't "proper" E.164 numbers

3. Outlook Voice Access (and perhaps other software) doesn't work well with numbers written in the +44 (0) format

4. Actually writing software to recognize such numbers is trivial, as evidenced by your mail rule.

So, rather than make Outlook Voice Access "people ready", instead you think that people need to make themselves E.164-ready. Instead of maybe ten minutes of programmer time writing code to recognize phone numbers as they exist in the real world, you want to waste hours of the collective time of all those "numpies", converting their phone numbers from a de facto standard format that everyone understands into a format that conforms to an obscure ITU recommendation.

re: Campaign for real numbers update

James ONeill — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:44:19 GMT

David. Watch this this space I'll see what I can conjour up ...

Got your number!?

Unified Communications @ Microsoft — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:29:45 GMT

This week, I unplugged the telephone on my desk and put it on the other pile of stuff on my desk that

re: Campaign for real numbers update

David V — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 02:07:26 GMT

Hello,

I'm in the Small Business World, and we're looking to toss our current VoIP system, as it's not terribly good. While we've been getting quotes from Cisco and the like, I've been trying to get an idea what we can use OCS 2007 for. Googling turns up only news stories that dance around providing any concrete information about what OCS 2007 actually will do, and installing the system for a test drive has proved to be struggle, though I'm persisting.

Could you point me in the direction of any real information about what OCS 2007 does, what its limits are, how it does it, and etc? A "Guide to interfacing OCS 2007 with Analog Phone Lines" would make me so happy I'd shine your shoes, but I'd take anything.

Thanks,

David