Address Book Server Phone Number Normalization

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.

Office Communicator requires standardized E.164 phone numbers. In order to use phone numbers that are unstructured or inconsistently formatted, Office Communications Server relies on the Address Book Server to perform phone number translation in conjunction with mapping rules.

Two types of rules can be applied to phone numbers. One type is the set of generic rules which are done automatically by the server. The other type is a set of sample company rules that can be edited and is included in the installation folder alongside ABServer.exe. The sample company rules include a comment at the start of the file informing the administrator that if they want company specific rules, they should copy the sample file to the output location for the pool and change the name to Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt, so that it will be used for future synchronization passes.

If the UseNormalizationRules WMI flag is set to TRUE, the rules are applied to those Active Directory attributes with 0x2000 bit set in the Flags column value. If the 0x1000 bit is set in the Flags column value, then the associated Active Directory attribute value is always normalized.

Sample_Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt is the sample file in which you configure rules specific to your company requirements. To use this file, copy it to Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt. Otherwise, Address Book Server will use only the generic rules configured by default on the server.