An Effective Directory?

[JediBMC]

I am at the hight of frustration. The directory functionality in my Definity is great, if every extension has a single user assigned to it. Unfortunately, it fails misserably when you have multiple people using a single extension or can't simply name an extension by the "last, first" naming convention. You also have no way of assigning an extension to a specific department. Sure, I can do this in my CAS (eCas), but that doesn't help much and doesn't overcome the 1 to 1 mapping of person to extension.

I am currently using an Access database to maintain our telephone directory. Unfortunatley, the database doesn't communicate with my Definity, so Adds/Moves/Changes need to be entered manually. So now I am making changes to the Definity, updating our CAS, and updating our telephone directory.

So, to make a long post short (too late), how do other people deal with this? Are there any packages out there that provide a truly effective directory that can draw information from the Definity?

-Brian-
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV.

 

[wleong]

The directory feature in the Definity is strickly a 1 to 1 as each name uniquely maps one extension. That's is what it is designed for. It was never intended for multiple people sharing a single extension. The last, first is what you put into page 1 of the Station under name form.

What i do is use MS SQL (in your case Access Database) in conjunction with AVAYA Site Administration to do a nightly scheduled download and write a macro in Access to have them imported. BTW ... AVAYA Site Administration does support an LDAP interface and can update that automatically if you want to go that route.

In MS Access ... you need to setup a table where you have all those one extension to many users stored mapping that to the Definity unique 1 to 1 extension. Then you need to create a table relationship or you can do a joint between the 2 tables using a query to assemble your real time telephone directory. As for updating CAS, AVAYA Site Administration has hooks in to that too.

As for other packages ... they are out there, but i have not seen one that i would like to discuss and those that are really good cost too much $$ and requires that you environment support Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP.