Phone Numbers and Dial Plans in Office Communications Server

Waveformation » Great Article on OCS E.164 aka RFC 3966

Waveformation » Great Article on OCS E.164 aka RFC 3966 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:15:16 GMT

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re: Phone Numbers and Dial Plans in Office Communications Server

Mark Hickson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:14:43 GMT

You've done a great job articulating the purpose and value of an E.164 dial plan, and thanks for that.

You mention the use of numbers in the form "+1234" as being very common, and the preferred method of "+15552227777;ext=1234". The reality is, however, that to this point gateways have not been able to sufficiently handle the ";ext" syntax. That has been my experience, anyway.

Do you have some pointers or tips on how to handle this? Or configurations/gateways that you've seen work well in this scenario?

Thanks,

Mark

re: Phone Numbers and Dial Plans in Office Communications Server

Mark Stafford — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 08:14:50 GMT

Mark,

I've had the opportunity to discuss the merits of a "pure" dial plan with Doug in person, and I can comment on your question since I'm currently dealing with it. We're repairing our dial plan from the tel:+0123 plan that makes Doug cringe to a more appropriate plan. Those users who wind up with tel:+12345678901;ext=1234 phone numbers generally don't have a DID, which means that the gateway really never has to deal with them. In our case, we plan to set the dominant part of the E.164 number to our autoattendant line, so that the outbound caller-id will display as the number we want people to call back. In other words, the ;ext=1234 is only useful inside the network. The only scenario where I can think of the extension being useful outside of OCS proper is in a coexistence scenario, at which point you may need to come up with a more forced dial plan that isn't quite as pure.

HTH,

Mark Stafford