Mark Twain quipped “The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated”. He might have been talking about the ubiquitous Phone Number and the smiting it got this week in the Australian IT, the Australia National Newspaper:
Mark Duncan, convergence practice manager for telecommunications systems manufacturer Avaya, says the old concept of an extension number belonging to a person is finished. Now the method is to click on a name and choose a communications channel.
You are going to have to trust me when I say that we are an awful long way off from this idea being mainstream. Indeed the whole phone network is predicated on a universal numbering system that is logical and easy for everyone to understand. The reason I say that is because in order to achieve this vision of name based dial plan, you need to have a comprehensive universal directory system implemented in your organization, let alone the rest of the world. From my experience we have a long way to go in implementing such directory systems. Yes we have systems like Active Directory or Enterprise LDAP directory services or Novell’s eNDS but they are workstation and server centric products, not telephony products. We are a long way from delivering comprehensive directory solutions for telephony but we are starting down that path.
