Voice Properties: Phone Usages

Use the Phone Usages tab to define phone usage records.

Phone usage records

This table lists existing phone usage records defined for your organization and available for assignment to specific routes and Voice policies.

Add

To add a phone usage record, click Add.

Edit

To revise a phone usage record, click it in the list, and then click Edit.

Remove

To delete a phone usage record, click it in the list, and then click Remove.

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Phone usage records are named classes of calls that specify which call routes a user is authorized to use, facilitating enforcement of both dialing authorization and route utilization. Phone usage records are similar to what in traditional telephony is known as "class of service," but phone usage records offer greater flexibility because they are applied to both users and routes, making it possible to formulate very precise phone authorizations for both individuals and groups.

You specify a phone usage record as an arbitrary label that enables you to identify a category of call destinations. You can name phone usage records whatever you like, but the names should be easily recognizable. For example, typical phone usage records might include "Local", "Area Code", "State", "Province, "USA", "Singapore", and "International".

After creating phone usage records, you then assign them to both of the following:

• Voice policies. These are named sets of phone usage records. Policies are used to assign call privileges to users. You assign a phone usage record to a Voice policy using the Policy tab of Voice Properties.

• Call routes. You assign a phone usage record to a route using the Routes tab of Voice Properties.

If a policy associated with a user account contains one or more phone usage records that match a phone usage record that is associated with a specific route, then the user is authorized to initiate calls that use that route.

The order in which you create phone usage records does not matter, but the order in which you assign them to Voice policies is significant because the server traverses the phone usage records in the Voice policies from top to bottom. For best performance, the phone usage records in each policy should be ordered top to bottom from most to least widely preferred. For example, RedmondLocal, RedmondLongDist, RedmondInternational, RedmondBackup.

Note: Planning phone usage records requires determining the permissions for which to create phone usage records.

For details, see the Office Communications Server Technical Library.