Dial plans are a set of translation rules used to convert the dialing habits of our company to the E.164 standard. The way our users compose a number is a mix of dialing public numbers and reaching internal extents. The aforementioned scenario means that dial plans will be tied to the story of the specific company.
Dial plans in the Lync Control Panel have a dedicated tab, which we can see in the following screenshot:
When we create a new rule, we can add associated normalization rules, as shown in the following screenshot:
Normalization rules are based on regular expressions, such as the following ones:
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Regular Expression |
Examples |
Target String |
Match |
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Note
A couple of good places to start learning about regular expressions are Regular-Expressions.info http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html, and Tips on Understanding Microsoft Regular Expressions http://images.globalknowledge.com/wwwimages/whitepaperpdf/WP_Parlas_MicrosoftOCS.pdf.
The normalization rule builder has four areas to configure:
- Starting digits: This area defines the leading digits of dialed numbers you want the pattern to match.
- Length: This area defines the number of digits in the matching pattern.
- Digits to remove: This area defines the number of starting digits to be removed from dialed numbers.
- Digits to add: This area defines the digits to be added to dialed numbers.
Manual editing and number testing are allowed, with the outline shown in the following screenshot:
A dial plan is applied to a scope, that could be user, pool, site, or global. As usual, the most specific policy will be applied over the other ones.
The preceding behavior is useful to address the need of the different branch offices, locations, and remote sites of our company. The main advantage of a user dial plan is that it will be applied consistently even if we have roaming of failover scenarios.