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Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Problems with Office Communicator handling extensions (disappearing phone number)

I ran into an interesting problem the other day while at a client’s office when I asked one of the IT managers about problems he has had with OCS 2007 R2.

One of the features I’ve always liked was the Outlook contact integration with the MOC client. I can look up phone numbers of the fly when I need to make a call outbound:

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The lookup work’s great. It pulls information from my Outlook contact list and allows me to dial:

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Ok, but what happens when I put in an extension?

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Once I put in an extension, my MOC client now longer shows the phone number.

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I haven’t really had the time to research this to see if there was a solution but definitely one of the issues I’ve never noticed.

Here’s the build information:

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

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Version 3.5.6907.196

Outlook 2007

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Version 12.0.6514.500 SP2 MSO 12.0.6535.5002

Updated on July 29, 2010

I posted this question on the Microsoft partner forums and was asked to try putting “X 243” in my Outlook contact but the number still didn’t show up. I actually went through this exercise with the client already asking him to try “X 243” and “X243” without any luck.

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2 comments:

Mark Hickson said...

It's because there isn't a valid regular expression in the Address Book Server normalization rules file for that phone number format, i.e. with an extension. Only numbers that have valid matches and can be properly normalized to E.164 will appear in the files created by the Address Book Server, and thus available to you in MOC as phone numbers for your contacts.

Terence Luk said...

Interesting, now I faintly remember those normalization rules in the file you showed me a while back! I miss those days...