[*] StarStar Me: Using your name as your phone number

[Ron Dallmeier]

For those interested - more info is available http://www.internet2.edu/sip.edu/

...Ron

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Ron Dallmeier <rondallmeier at fiber.ca> wrote:
> What you are describing wasn't created by MS (so far as I know)? But I
> am happy to see that they adopted the correct solution.
> It sounds identical to sip.edu.
> We had an project at MRnet (winter of 2004/2005). Bill had set this up
> on a MRnet server (asterisk and SER). We could direct sip2sip call
> people at the big universities in the US by their email address.
> You attempt to make the call using the email address. The sip proxy
> does a DNS-SRV record lookup to see if there is a sip gateway for that
> domain, if so the call setup request to sent that way.
> The sip gateway would know if the target user had a active sip
> registration or the participating universities would map the email to
> the respective campus phone using existing database lookups.
> Funny thing the biggest problem with our project was getting it to
> work with the UofM's PBX via PRI (we weren't getting the dialed
> number).
>
> ...Ron
>
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 8:21 AM, John Lange <john at johnlange.ca> wrote:
>> That article about the ** thing is just a gimmick. Basically it's a
>> speed-dial-by-name. If you a contact list you can already dial-by-name.
>>
>> But Ron's comment about email addresses reminded me of something...
>>
>> A few years back we talked about the challenge direct "dialing" people with
>> the keypad who don't have a phone number. There have been a few proposals in
>> this area specifically things like ENUM.
>>
>> What I've come to realize in the intervening time is that this problem is
>> already well on it's way to solving itself and it's actually not that
>> complicated.
>>
>> Step 1. Forget about the numeric keypad as the problem. With the
>> proliferation of smartphones, just about everyone effectively dials by name.
>> They lookup a contact and then press "call". On my smartphone, when I touch
>> the "phone" button, it doesn't come up with a keypad, it comes up with a
>> list of searchable contacts. I can't even remember the last time I called
>> someone by punching in numbers using the keypad. So while I may not be
>> typical, it does prove that it's possible to get rid of they keypad as the
>> primary input device.
>>
>> With deskphones it's the same thing. If you look at Microsoft Lync, even the
>> desk phone is integrated with your address book. I just start spelling the
>> name with the keypad and typically within 3 key presses it's narrowed the
>> list down to my intended contact (It automatically matches the name or the
>> phone number as I type it in).
>>
>> Step 2. Adopt a standard for direct sip-to-sip calling. Microsoft (yes
>> Microsoft!) has already solved this problem with an elegant and simple
>> solution; DNS SRV. It works like this: take an email address and look up the
>> sip service for my domain using DNS SRV, then call that destination directly
>> bypassing the PSTN.
>>
>> So lets take this as a practical example. Lets say I have a contact in my
>> address book "Mike Smith". I probably have his name, email and phone number.
>> If I want to call Mike, I look up his contact and touch "call". In the
>> background my voice application (my "phone") does DNS SRV lookup for SIP
>> using his email address. If it returns a result, I "dial" that and talk to
>> Mike. If it fails, I fall-back to a traditional PSTN/Cell call.
>>
>> John