Monday, February 03, 2014

Testing out Emergency Calling with Lync

Microsoft’s Lync server has a great feature called E911 – Emergency calling mainly for the UK and Canada. I teach Lync and find this topic to be of only minor interest in the UK and Europe mainly because we do not have E911 service over here (yet, anyway!).

Gary Williams has just published a great blog article entitled Is it OK to Place a Test Call to Emergency Services. His answer is Yes and he goes about telling how to do it. I have to say, I’ve always been quite nervous about testing out calls to 999 – and have only twice every had to call it for real.

But Gary’s article makes it clear that yes you can do this and also makes the good point that not testing it can be life threatening if it doesn’t work. He sets out how to do it in the article and it’s pretty simple. Gary also notes another potential gotcha – Lync will add a leading “+” to the number (e.g. if you dial 999, Lync ‘dials’ +999). Thus it’s vital that you have your routes are set up expecting this.

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