Outside Voice Control Scenario

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.

Mobile phones are a key facet of information worker communications. Accordingly, incorporating mobility into a unified communications plan is essential for true unification of communications. Although the e-mail, instant messaging (IM), and federated telephony worlds are already becoming unified by having a single Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) address (which is typically the e-mail address) be the single point of contact for a person, this unification has not yet extended to the mobile phone space. Information workers still end up exchanging mobile phone numbers in addition to their work phone numbers as part of their contact information. This has led to a suboptimal user experience. For example, a caller from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) tries to reach a certain user by dialing the user’s office phone number. If she cannot reach the user at his office phone, she bypasses the corporate voice mail system by disconnecting the original call and dialing the user’s mobile phone number. If the caller cannot reach the user on his mobile phone, the caller leaves a message on the user’s voice mail box in the mobile phone network. As a result, the recipient ends up checking his Outlook inbox for e-mails, corporate voice mail system for some voice mails, and his mobile phone provider’s voice mailbox for other voice mails.

A unified communications solution needs to provide means for the user to control any communication stream in a unified fashion at all times. By giving out a mobile phone number, a secondary access channel to the user has been opened that currently bypasses the user’s unified communications solution in the company. With Office Communications Server 2007 R2 a new feature has been introduced, called Outside Voice Control, that enables users to hide their mobile phone number for inbound and outbound calls. This feature is sometimes referred to as outside voice.

To use this feature, a user needs to install Office Communicator Mobile (2007 R2 release) on a Windows Mobile phone, and a data service such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) to provide IP data communication between the mobile phone and the Internet. This network carries SIP messages (that is, but not audio media) between the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 system (that is, by using the organization’s Edge Server) and the Communicator Mobile client. The user also needs to be enabled for Enterprise Voice.

If the user receives an incoming call on his SIP Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), either from the PSTN or from other Office Communications Server 2007 R2 users or from a federated contact, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 sends a SIP INVITE to all of the user’s registered SIP endpoints (for example, Office Communicator 2007 R2, Office Communicator Phone Edition) as well as to the user’s Communicator Mobile client running on the Windows Mobile device. After this SIP INVITE message reaches the Communicator Mobile client using the data channel of the mobile phone, Communicator Mobile automatically accepts the incoming call and changes the user’s presence to In a Call. Next, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 initiates an outbound call to user’s mobile phone number by using an Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Mediation Server and PSTN access point (that is, by using a gateway, PBX, or SIP Trunk service provider). The user receives a second incoming call through the mobile phone provider’s cellular network and is able to accept the call. Note that the actual mobile phone call is not a Voice over IP (VoIP) call where audio has been transmitted by using the mobile phone provider’s data packet network to Communicator Mobile. Instead, it is a normal mobile phone call that uses the mobile phone provider’s cellular network.

For an outbound call from her mobile phone, the user has the option to enter the phone number to be dialed in Communicator Mobile or to initiate a call to a SIP contact using Communicator Mobile. If the user chooses the Call menu option in Communicator Mobile, the call is placed by the mobile phone by using the mobile phone network. However, if the user chooses the Call via work option in Communicator Mobile, the phone first sends a SIP INVITE to Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 establishes a call to the user’s mobile phone number over the PSTN. The user receives an incoming mobile phone call from his company by using the mobile phone provider’s cellular network. Finally, after the user accepts the call from his company, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 sets up a second call leg to the designated called party and joins the two connections. (Note that if the Called Party is on the PSTN, the two call legs can be over separate Mediation Servers that have completely different PSTN break-out locations.) The called party receives a call from the user’s company by using the user’s office phone number as the Calling Party number despite the fact that the user is actually on her mobile phone.

Following are some of the benefits for the company and the user associated with this scenario:

• The user’s office phone number can become the only phone number that is published on business cards and other business materials. The mobile phone number can be shared with selected people.

• Activities on the user’s mobile phone (for example, when participating in a mobile phone call) can be aggregated to the user’s overall presence state.

• If the user is enabled for Enterprise Voice and Exchange 2007 SP1 Unified Messaging, the user can disable his mobile phone voice mail box and use Exchange 2007 SP1 Unified Messaging as his only voice mail repository. This has all the advantages of using an Outlook Inbox for all communications (for example, e-mail, missed call notifications, voice mail, team call pick-up notifications, and so on).

• By setting up an outbound mobile phone call through Office Communications Server 2007 R2 by using the Outside Voice Control functionality, call charge reductions may occur. For example, if the user wants to call an international phone number from his mobile phone for a longer conference call, call charges can be lowered significantly by placing the call from the company to the international number through the PSTN, bypassing the mobile phone network (despite another call leg being established from the company to the user’s mobile phone number). Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Least-Cost Routing functionality helps save additional costs in these situations. Even more obvious are the savings what occur when the user calls a federated contact who has a phone number based in another country. Instead of calling the international number directly from the user’s mobile phone, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 can use an Office Communications Server Edge Server to connect this federated call leg with the call leg to the user’s mobile phone.

• All calls initiated through Office Communications Server 2007 R2 are captured for Call Detail Recording (CDR) and Quality-of-Experience (QoE) as part of the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Monitoring Server. However, the QoE data is only on the VoIP legs of the call and does not reflect the quality of the PSTN or mobile provider network.