Exchange UM: Protecting your mobile number

Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging (which I’ll call “UM”) has many great features. Rather than describe the features in detail, in the next few postings I’ll try to present some of these features as solutions to problems that most of us face.

If, like me, you carry a mobile phone that you use for both personal and business calls, there is a natural resistance to giving out the number to business contacts. No matter how much business I do with the famous Contoso, and regardless of how closely I’ve been collaborating with Todd Meadows of Contoso on our joint press release, I want to keep control of my communication with Todd. In particular, although I’d like him to be able to reach me on my mobile phone, I don’t want to give out the number. He has my business card with my office number, and that should be enough.

UM offers a way to solve this problem. From my personal options screen, which I can reach from Outlook 2010 or Exchange’s Outlook Web App (OWA), I can create a Call Answering Rule for Todd.

When Todd calls my office number and I don’t answer, UM will pick up the call, find the rule that I created, and follow the instructions in the rule.

UM will play the special greeting I recorded: “Hello, Todd. I’m not at my desk at the moment. If you want to try to reach me on my mobile phone, press 1. If you just want to leave me a voice message, press 2. ”

If Todd presses 1, UM will ask him to speak his name, and then ask him to wait while it tries to find me. It will place Todd on hold, and make a call to my mobile number (which I placed in the rule, where only I can see it). If I answer UM’s call on my mobile phone, it will play Todd’s name and ask me if I want to speak with him. If I say “Yes”, UM will take Todd off hold, and connect him to me. The end result is that Todd called me on my mobile phone, without knowing the number.

This is an easy way for me to increase control of my communications.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Markus, Thank you for the suggestion. UM in Exchange 2010 does not provide an administrator interface to the definition of the users' Call Answering Rules. UM does allow administrators to block users from creating Call Answering Rules, or to limit the phone numbers to which those users and their rules can place outbound calls. The reason that we did not provide admin access to Call Answering Rules was to allow users' personal phone numbers (which they might enter into Call Answering Rules) to remain private, if they wish. I agree that there are circumstances (such as the OOF scenario you descibe) in which it could be useful for an administrator to create a Call Answering Rule on behalf of a user. We'll certainly consider this for a later release.  -- Michael

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2010
  Dear Michael! Thank you for this posting! Is there a possibility, to provide call answering rules from an admin to users? for example: lets say the company wants to disable the ability to leave voice-messages to employees during them being out of office. Is it possible to provision a call answering rule to the users, which disables the ability to leave voice messages while their out of office assistant is activated? I can do this scenario for myself, when defining call answering rules in OWA, however I didnt find this possibility from an admin point of view. Thank you very much for your comment in advance! Best regards Markus