How’s that for a title? This blog came out of a question a student asked me in last weeks RightFax class in our Hoofddorp, NL office. He asked about recognizing a plus sign in the phone number. As usual, I had an answer right away for him and told him we would try it out when we got to dialing rules. And when we got there…well, my answer didn’t work. ACK!!! When something like this happens, I like to investigate and then produce a blog or maybe even a video. And here we are.
But before I get to the problem and solution, let me remind you what Dialing Rules are. Basically they allow the fax server to manipulate the fax number that was entered when the outgoing fax was created. Sometimes you want the fax to go out through a special server on a special channel, depending on the sender’s status in the organization, or the time of day, or the country the fax is being sent to, or the size of the fax, or even how busy the local fax server is. All of that and a whole lot more is possible with Dialing Rules. They are really cool!!!
So what about this question of the plus sign? Well, the documentation talks about using a plus in a Dialing Rule pattern as a kind of universal wildcard. When a plus is in the rule, we ignore all other numbers and just apply the rule. Using a plus for a wildcard makes sense because in the US, plus signs never show up in a phone number. Having grown up in Miami with family in the UK, I know that the only way anyone dials an international number is to dial 011, then the country code. We called my grandmother every week and the number starts with 01144 and then a bunch of other numbers I can’t remember. Everyone knows that and if its true in the US, it HAS to be true everywhere else, right?
It wasn’t until I moved to Europe that I realised that the US was in fact the ONLY country on the ENTIRE PLANET that wouldn’t dial that number as +44 and then the rest of the numbers to call my grandmother. OK, my grandmother was never that popular, but you get the idea. Everyone else uses a plus and then the country code. If you don’t have a plus button on your phone, then its two zeros. Roughly half of one percent of the countries of the world use 011 for international. So being able to put a plus sign in the dialing rule is actually pretty important.
But again, a plus sign on its own in a Dialing Rule pattern is a universal wildcard. It matches everything. So when you put a plus sign at the beginning of the rule, every possible fax number is a match. If i have a pattern that is +44123456789, then all outgoing fax numbers will match, even 987654321123456789987654321 or 8675309.
So what’s the answer? Well I assumed that the answer was to put a 00 at the beginning instead of that + sign. That does work if I am using 00 in my fax, but Rightfax does not translate the + to 00. The solution to this problem was buried in an old Knowledge Center article that talked about RightFax 8.7. In that older version, you needed to add some keys to the registry, but thats not necessary anymore. It turns out that you can simply escape the + with a backslash. So \+, then the country code and the numbers is the right pattern to use for an international number for the other 99.95 percent of the world.
Lets say we have a fax server in my Amsterdam office. Most people will copy a recipients fax number into their phone book using the full international number. But when dialing locally, you usually just dial 0, then the rest of the nine digits of the number. So to call +31 123456789, you would actually dial 0123456789 when in the Netherlands, but the +31 version everywhere else (except the US). To deal with this automatically, create a dialing rule pattern of \+31?????????. Then go to number adjustments, remove the first 3 digits, and add a 0 at the beginning.
When we try to send a fax to +31123456789, we can see that 031123456789 is actually dialed.
Maybe you have a deal worked out with your phone company that all calls from one office get a good rate for international calls, but all the other offices make mostly local calls. When a fax needs to go out to a different country, have it sent over the WAN to the other office and go out onto the PSTN there. You could create a rule that looks for all numbers that start with a plus.
As you can see, a plus sign isnt always a plus sign, especially when the plus should be a plus.
Are you using plus signs in your dialing rules? Did you already know about this? If this is useful, let me know in the comments below. You can also contact me on Twitter where I go by the name technovangelist.
July 29, 2011 
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OpenText RightFax exhibited at Cisco Live 2011 in Las Vegas, NV from 7/10 to 7/14. As a Preferred Solution Developer member in the Cisco Solution Developer Network (CDN), OpenText RightFax is a recognized leader in providing IP faxing solutions to Cisco clients and partners. This year’s exhibit hall discussions included our completed RightFax and CUCM 8.x interoperability, as well as our recently certified RightFax 10 Branch Office interoperability with the Cisco UCS Express/SRE-V platform. The combined Cisco and OpenText RightFax solution supports organizational requirements at the branch office where application survivability and compliancy are requirements. 
