Providing Phone Book Support

Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Foundation, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Vista

Connection Point Services (CPS) provides support for creating, maintaining, and updating phone books. You can also create your own phone book (without CPS), but the complexity of the format and requirements makes this difficult if you have more than a single Point of Presence (POP). For more information, see Connection Point Services and Connection Manager.

Specifying how the phone book is to be provided

Using the CMAK wizard, you can either:

• Include a phone book in your connection profile, without support for automatic upgrades. To do this, in the CMAK wizard:

  1. On the Phone Book page, browse to the phone book (.pbk) file that you want to include in your connection profile. Make sure that you have a region file with the same name located in the same folder as the .pbk file. For example, if your phone book file name is AwesomeE.pbk, the region file should be AwesomeE.pbr.

  2. Make sure that the Automatically download phone book updates check box is not selected.

• Include a phone book in your connection profile, with support for automatic upgrades. To do this, in the CMAK wizard:

  1. On the Phone Book page, browse to the phone book (.pbk) file that you want to include in your connection profile. Make sure that you have a region file with the same name located in the same folder as the .pbk file. For example, if your phone book file name is AwesomeE.pbk, the region file should be AwesomeE.pbr. Make sure the Automatically download phone book updates check box is selected.

  2. On the Phone Book Updates page, type the URL for the Phone Book Service (PBS) server from which upgrades are to be downloaded.

• Do not include a phone book in your connection profile, but download the phone book (and upgrades) to your users later. To do this, in the CMAK wizard:

  1. On the Phone Book page, select Automatically download phone book updates, but leave the Phone book file box blank.

  2. On the Phone Book Updates page, type the name of the phone book (.pbk) file to be downloaded (but do not include the file name extension) and the URL for the PBS server from which it (and the upgrades) can be downloaded.

  If you use this method of providing the phone book, you will also be able to automatically download updates to your users, using the same phone book name and URL.

The phone book name that you provide must match the name of the phone book file created with CPS. This file name consists of a maximum of 8 alphanumeric characters and cannot include spaces or a file name extension. If you specify support for automatic updates, each time the user connects to your service, the PBS server automatically downloads any updates to the phone book.

Using more access numbers

Using Phone Book Administrator in CPS, you can set up phone books to list certain POPs under Access numbers and other POPs under More access numbers. If you want to separate phone numbers into two sets, you must configure the phone book for this purpose before you use it in a connection profile. You can separate the numbers in different ways, such as by separating standard access numbers from 800 and 888 numbers or by separating no-surcharge access numbers from access numbers that incur a surcharge when a user uses one of them to connect. For more information, see Connection Point Services.

If your phone book specifies a second set of access numbers, those numbers appear in the More access numbers box in the Phone Book dialog box.

To customize information about these numbers:

• Provide a line of text to appear in the dialog box, next to the More access numbers box. This line of text should be no more than about 100 characters. (The maximum size varies based on line breaks and other formatting considerations.) This line of text appears only when alternate access numbers are available for the selected geographic area.

• Edit the definition Help for the list of alternate phone numbers. The default Help states that the user can be charged extra for using alternate phone numbers. If this is not true for your alternate phone numbers, edit these Help topics. For more information on customizing Help, see Providing Custom Connection Manager Help (.chm) and Providing Custom Connection Manager Help (.hlp).

Advanced customization for the phone book

Through advanced customization, you can also:

• Control which service types (such as modem or ISDN) appear in the Phone Book dialog box.

• Change the message displayed during phone book updates (such as "Downloading new Awesome Computers backup company phone book.").

• Control the delay before downloading phone book updates.

For more information on advanced customization techniques, see Advanced Customization.

Creating a single-POP phone book

You can include a default phone book that contains a single phone number. This is useful if you want your customers to access your service through one POP. When you want to create a phone book for multiple POPs, you should use CPS.

To create a single-POP phone book, you must create both a phone book (.pbk) file and an region (.pbr) file. In the CMAK wizard, you specify only the name of the .pbk file, but the wizard requires that a .pbr file with the same name be located in the same folder as the .pbk file.

Creating a .pbr file for a single-POP phone book

The region file you create for your single-POP phone book must be in plain-text and must have two lines:

• The first line contains a number specifying how many regions are in the region file.

• The second line contains the name of the state or province (or other geographical area). Do not use commas or semi-colons in this line. The file name (excluding the extension) cannot exceed eight characters.

For example, if the POP were located in Washington, the contents of the single-POP .pbr file might be:

1
Washington

To create a .pbr file for a single-POP phone book

1. Start a text editor such as Notepad.

2. Type a 1 and press ENTER.

3. Type the name of the region and press ENTER.

4. Save the file in plain-text (text-only) format, naming it in the following format:

   PBname.pbr

Creating a .pbk file for a single-POP phone book

The file you create for your single-POP phone book:

• Must be located in the same folder as the .pbr file. The file name (excluding the extension) cannot exceed eight characters and cannot contain spaces.

• Must be in plain-text (.txt), comma-delimited format, and must include fields in the following sequence and without any spaces (if necessary, please scroll this page to read all 11 fields):

  Index,Country/dependencyID,RegionID,POPName,AreaCode,PhoneNumber,MinBaud,MaxBaud,Reserved,ServiceType,DUNEntry

  For example, a single-POP phone book for the fictitious company, Awesome Computers, might have the following specification:

  1,44,1,AwesomeE - Basecamp,999,555-0134,9600,56000,0,0,Awesome Dun
  

For more information about what to specify for each field, see Connection Point Services.

Additional references

• Phase Two: Developing Custom Elements