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Added by Mike Pfeiffer February 27, 2012

Those of us who have lived in the US and Canada for years have gotten used to dialing 411 for directory assistance. As you probably know, you can use a 411 service to get address and phone number information for an individual person or place of business.

If you’re going with a pure VOIP deployment with Lync, your SIP trunk vendor might not provide this functionality, but you can still allow your users to dial a free 411 service. There are a handful of them available, and I’ve found that Bing’s free 411 service works great for this.

Bing 411 is a toll free audio service that gives you directions, traffic information, weather conditions, movie show times, and more from your phone. To leverage this through Lync, you can create a normalization rule will allow users to dial 411 and have that translate to Bing’s toll free number.

Here’s a screenshot of how you would add this normalization rule to the global dial plan:

For more details on Bing 411, check out disoverbing.com/mobile/411

Enjoy!

Mike Pfeiffer – Microsoft MVP
Director of Unified Communications
Interface Technical Training