Configuring Address Book Server Phone 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.

Phone numbers that are stored in disparate directories are essentially unstructured strings that lack a strict model for consistency. Communicator requires standardized E.164 phone numbers. This number translation is performed by the Address Book Server in conjunction with mapping rules. Two types of rules can be applied to phone numbers:

• Generic rules are a resource inside of the ABServer.exe file, which will enforce the fact that they are not editable.

• A sample company rule is in a text file that is included in the installation folder alongside ABServer.exe, with a comment at the top of the file telling the administrator that, to implement a company specific rule, to 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 can be used for future synchronization passes.

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 uses only the built in generic rules. Company rules override the generic rules.