A custom telephone number normalization rule is not applied by the Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 version of the Address Book Service (AbServer.exe)

You may experience both of the following symptoms with certain telephone number entries when you use the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) version of the Address Book Service (AbServer.exe):

• When you create a telephone number normalization rule in the Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt file, the Address Book Service does not apply the rule.
• When you run the abserver -testphonenorm command to test the telephone number normalization rule that you created, the Address Book Service applies the rule as expected.

This problem occurs because of the way in which the Address Book Service normalizes telephone number entries. Internally, the Address Book Service applies what is known as the E164 normalization rule. The E164 normalization rule is applied before the Address Book Service uses the rules file to normalize telephone numbers. A telephone number matches the E164 normalization rule if all the following conditions are true:

• The telephone number starts with a plus sign (+).
• The telephone number has no more than 14 digits.
• The telephone number contains one or more of the following separators:
  • A space
  • A period
  • A dash
  • An opening parenthesis
  • A closing parenthesis

If a telephone number matches the E164 normalization rule, the Address Book Service removes all the separators from this telephone number. For example, the telephone number +33(0) 169555412 is normalized to the following telephone number: This normalization process causes the following behavior:

• Your rule is not applied if the following conditions are true:
  • You add a rule to the Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt.
  • A telephone number matches the E164 normalization rule.
  This behavior occurs because the E164 normalization rule is applied before the company rules are applied.
• Your rule is successfully applied if the following conditions are true:
  • You run the abserver -testphonenorm command to test your company rule.
  • A telephone number matches the E164 normalization rule.
  This behavior occurs because the abserver -testphonenorm command does not apply the E164 normalization rule.

To resolve this problem, install the software update that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: When you install this hotfix, both of the following changes are made to the Address Book Service:

• The Address Book Service includes E164 as a keyword in the generic rules file. If you want to apply the E164 normalization rule, this keyword lets you control the location in the rules list where the E164 normalization rule is applied.
• The abserver -testphonenorm command performs the same normalization that is performed by the abserver -syncnow command.