[alistairb]

how do you guys cope with internal and external phone numbers in the Global Address List?

We have 5000+ staff scattered around the world with a 5-digit internal dialplan, anyone can call anyone globally across the internal network by dialing their 5-digit internal extension number.

So ideally I would like to put each staff member's 5-digit internal number in the Active Directory field "BusinessPhone" and put the external number in the "BusinessPhone2" field. This is because the Outlook Address Book (OAB) is hard-coded to display the BusinessPhone field only in its search summary, not BusinessPhone2.

But then I have almost as many Blackberries out there using a recent BES. The much vaunted/criticized "Lookup" facility also appears to be hardwired to use the BusinessPhone1 field. My 5-digit numbers are no use to the Blackberry, it wants to see a real red-blooded external number, ideally including country code.

Recent versions of BES do support Contact/Blackberry field mapping - but this is exactly that, mapping of fields between the Outlook Contacts and their Blackberry contacts. It seems to have no effect on the Lookup function.

Does anyone else have such a globally coordinated dialplan? Where have you stored the internal extension numbers and the equivalent external numbers in AD, and how have you ensure that users see the internal numbers through Outlook when they are at their desks but the the external numbers on their Blackberries when they are on the road.

I can't be the only sysadmin with this dilemma.

Alistair

[aschieman]

Take a look at smart dialing in the BlackBerry.

Setup smart dialing and then add the extension to an address book field. When you tell the BlackBerry to dial the field with the extension, the BlackBerry will call the corporate number you setup in Smart Dialing first followed by the extension.

If you have a voice activated BlackBerry, you can also say "Call Extension x" and it will dial the corporate number first, followed by the extension.

[alistairb]

Won't work, sorry. "Smart" dialing assumes a common external translation, i.e. everyone is working from the same office.

Our internal numbers are spread across 38 sites in almost as many countries, so the indial prefix varies widely.

[aschieman]

True. How about setting up the second number in this format:

444-444-4444x12345

The BlackBerry will recognize the number after the x as an extension.

[alistairb]

Thanks to everyone who responded. We have a solution.

The AD/Blackberry global field mapping in the latest BES versions *does* apply both to the personal contact synchronisation and to the lookup function - with one restriction.

With the personal contacts you can map anything to anything, e.g. Microsoft's BusinessPhone2 to Blackberry's "Work" field, which is what we originally intended.

With directory lookup you can only map to fields which are in the Global Address List (GAL), which is a small subset of the fields available in AD.

BusinessPhone2 is not in the GAL, so that won't work.

So basically all we have to do is to put the user's external number into a spare field of this subset - we have chosen the "pager" field - and map this onto the Blackberry's "Work" field.

So when using Outlook in their offices, staff will see the 5-digit internal number as the primary phone number (from AD's BusinessPhone1 field); when using their blackberries they will see the external number as the primary Work phone number (from AD's Pager field).

Not a perfect solution by any means, as it screws up people's personal contacts (their main phone number will now no longer appear as Work, the best we can offer is Work2).

But heck's it's close enough. And time to stop thinking about work problems on a Saturday.

Alistair Birch