Administer phone books

  • Article

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Administer phone books

Connection Point Services (CPS) provides two ways to administer phone books: by using the Phone Book Administrator (PBA) interface and by using the command line. You are advised to create and publish your first phone book by using the PBA interface, even if you plan to use the command line for your usual publishing procedures.

Phone books

Establishing a new phone book is as easy as giving it a name and configuring it with a server name or address, user name, and password. Because Connection Manager (CM) must be configured to query the Phone Book Service database for phone books, the phone book names you choose must match the ones in the service profile created by the Connection Manager Administration Kit (CMAK) wizard. If your Connection Manager profile will use multiple phone books, name them intuitively, according to their use.

For a comprehensive understanding of how CPS works with Connection Manager, run the CMAK wizard and explore CM concepts.

Make sure that you plan a method for maintaining phone books. Ask yourself:

  • Who will be entering data?

  • If you will be using the command line for administration, who will create and maintain data files? Will you be exporting data from an existing database or typing new files by hand?

  • Do you want to use the same phone book for all locales, or should you translate and maintain multiple language versions: one for each country or dependency? Phone Book Administrator is available only in English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. However, you can create a phone book in another language by running PBA on an operating system optimized for that language.

After you create a phone book, you must add POPs, and you can create regions. You can update either of these as often as necessary.

For information on how to create a phone book, see Add and configure a new phone book or Add a new phone book by command line.

Regions

To reduce the number of POPs that Connection Manager displays at any one time, you may want to designate areas within a country or dependency as regions. Such a filtered list makes the task of choosing the closest POP easier for your users.

For information on how to add regions, see Add, edit, or delete a region or Add, edit, or delete regions by command line.

Points of Presence (POPs)

The primary purpose of adding and editing POPs is to make updated access information available to your users.

POP information specifies how Connection Manager establishes a connection and how access numbers are displayed to users. For example, when you select the Surcharge POP setting, Connection Manager displays the POP in the More access numbers box instead of the Access numbers box. This feature can be used to differentiate automatically between remote-access numbers for corporate private networks and secure connections.

In preparing to create a POP, ask yourself the following questions:

  • In what country or dependency does the POP exist? The list of countries and dependencies provided by CPS associates the Telephony Applications Program Interface (TAPI) country/dependency code with the POP. Although Phone Book Administrator is only available in English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish, and the country/dependency list only appears in English, country/dependency names chosen from the English list appear in the same language as the Connection Manager profile.

  • Does your POP belong to a region?

  • What name will you give the POP?

  • What is the area code for the access number?

  • What is the access number?

  • What POP settings will you need? For information about POP settings, see Service types (POP settings).

  • What special dial-up settings will you need? Connection Manager and CPS must use the same dial-up entry name.

  • What is the minimum baud for the POP?

  • What is the maximum baud for the POP?

  • What is the POP status: In Service or Not In Service? (When you publish to Phone Book Server, only in-service POPs are used to create or update the phone book files).

For information on how to create POPs, see Add or edit a POP or Add, edit, or delete POPs by command line.

Publishing

Before attempting to publish a phone book, make sure that you have set the Write permission for the FTP virtual directory on the computer running Phone Book Service. If the Write permission is not set, the phone book will not post.

You can publish multiple phone books to a server. However, every time you publish a phone book, CPS increments the version number of the phone book. If you publish the same phone book to multiple servers, the version numbers will be inaccurate. To publish a phone book to multiple servers, you can use file replication.

For information on how to publish a phone book, see Publish a phone book or Publish a phone book by command line.