Calling Party Manipulation

A really big pain point in Lync has been the lack of control over the calling party, or source, telephone number display in outbound calls. Trunk translation rules in Lync Server 2010 allowed modification of the called, or dialed, party, but had no support for the calling number. The best Lync could do was remove the leading + sign before sending the call to a PSTN gateway. The end result was that administrators had to manage translation rules both within Lync and at the media gateway, which undoubtedly led to inconsistencies and troubleshooting issues down the road.

Lync Server 2013 has introduced the capability to manipulate the calling party on trunk translation rules in addition to the called party. Administrators now have a single point of configuration for basic number manipulations, which should help simplify deployments. Media gateways can still be useful for advanced manipulations specific to a T1 or E1 circuit, but are no longer required for the outbound calling party.