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You Must Enter Telephone Numbers in Canonical Form in Order to Use Dialing Rules

Article ID: 247192 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q247192

For a Microsoft Windows XP version of this article, see 318575

(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318575/EN-US/ )

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SYMPTOMS

Dialing rules are not being applied to Windows 2000 applets, such as Fax and Phone Dialer.

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The telephone numbers are not in canonical form.

When you enter telephone numbers for Windows 2000 applets such as Fax or Phone Dialer, you must enter them in canonical form. If the form is not used, the dialing rules are not applied.

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RESOLUTION

Enter the number in the following format:

+Country/RegionCode (AreaCode) SubscriberNumber

For example, this is how you would enter a number for a subscriber in the United States of America in canonical format:

+1 (123) 456-7890

For more information about necessary dialing characters and numbers, see the Windows 2000 Help file section, "Canonical address format for phone numbers."

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STATUS

This behavior is by design.

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MORE INFORMATION

In order to properly apply the dialing rules, some Windows 2000 applets must know both of the following:

Where the call is being dialed from (dialing rules)
Where the call is being dialed to (the full canonical number)

This includes the country code and area code in both cases.

If you enter only a string of digits, the computer cannot reliably parse this information and determine what portion of the number is the country code, area code or local number.

NOTE: Applications that store numbers, such as Microsoft Outlook, attempt to intelligently convert random strings of digits into canonical numbers before Outlook stores them in the Contacts folder.

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