Location Profiles in Office Communications Server
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.
Organizations that conduct business in more than one geographic location require some way to translate identical phone number strings into numbers that are valid for each location. A traditional PBX system solves the problem by maintaining separate numbering plans for each site. When a PBX receives a call to a particular user extension, there is no ambiguity about the appropriate destination because the PBX is configured only for the site where it is deployed. The Enterprise Voice infrastructure, however, is quite different. Unlike the site-specific PBX, Enterprise Voice is distributed across the enterprise network, and dialing, say, extension 55555 will reach one number in Redmond and other, different numbers in Dallas, London, or Singapore.
The solution is location profiles. A location profile is a named set of normalization rules that translate phone numbers for a named location to a single standard (E.164) format for purposes of phone authorization and call routing. The normalization rules define how phone numbers expressed in various formats are to be routed for the named location. The same number string may be interpreted and translated differently depending on the locale from which it is dialed.
Because the Enterprise Voice solution aims to provide a seamless experience to end users as they transition from an existing telephony system, it is critical that dialing habits are preserved through the transition. For example, if Bob at site-A used to dial 12345 to reach Joe, it should be possible for him to continue to be able to reach Joe by dialing 12345 after he has moved to Enterprise Voice.
A large organization may need a separate location profile for each location where it maintains an office. If your organization has a legacy PBX deployed, as most do, you can use its dial plan to create location profiles.
Enterprise Voice clients are configured with a location profile, and when making a call to a destination that is not referenced as E.164 or SIP-URI (user URI), the clients include a phone-context attribute that specifies the name of the location profile that needs to be used to translate the number.
For example: INVITE SIP:5550100;phone-context=redmond@contoso.com
The following mechanisms configure Enterprise Voice clients with the appropriate location profiles:
Office Communicator
Each Communications Server 2007 pool is configured with a location profile, and this is sent to Communicator by means of in-band provisioning.
Since a pool can serve multiple locations, the pool-level location profile might not be sufficient. Therefore, Communicator also supports configuring the location profile for the user by means of GPO (Group Policy Objects).
Microsoft Office Communicator Phone Edition
The list of supported location profiles and the pool-level default is sent to the device by means of in-band provisioning.
Users have the flexibility of setting the default location profile using the device interface.
Each Location Profile has an ordered list of normalization rules, which are used to translate a dialed number. A normalization rule contains:
Number pattern – a regular expression
Translation – a translation pattern
For example, the following normalization rule
NormRule1 ^5(\d{4})$ +1425555$1,
translates the dialed number 50100 to the E.164 format +14255550100. The regular expression (^5(\d{4})$) matches any number that starts with the numeral 5 followed by any 4 digits.
Note
The order of the normalization rules in a location profile has significance because the first rule that matches is used to translate the number. If no match is found, an error response is sent to the caller.
The following figure illustrates three location profiles for locations in Redmond, Dallas, and New York, and contains some example normalization rules that are contained as part of the location profiles:
Figure 9. Location profiles for Redmond, Dallas, and New York
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