Localized Dialing Rules in the Lync Optimizer

I'm always looking for input from the community about things they'd like to see in the Lync Dialing Rule Optimizer.  I met Pat Richard at the MVP Summit this week and he needed help in the following scenario:

He has a customer who has a centralized Lync deployment located in the United States. There are several small offices located in other countries who connect to the US Lync server and use it for Enterprise Voice.  He wanted the users in the small offices to be able to dial phone numbers as if they were logged into a local Lync server.

For example, a UK user wants to be able to dial local UK numbers by dialing 6 or 7 digits. They dial national numbers by prepending a 0.  They know they have to prepend 00 for international calls.  They don't want to have to dial 01144xxxxxxxx for what they perceive to be a local call.

After some thought, I've updated the Optimizer to be able to handle this situation.  If you want to provide localized dialing rules for different countries, just do the following:

1. Start with a clean Enterprise Voice slate
2. Run the Optimizer against your Lync site using the generated script appropriate for your country, which will generate the necessary dialing rules for the country where your Lync server resides.
3. Run the Optimizer for each country you want to create localized dialing rules and apply the generated script against your central Lync site.

By default, the rulesets for all countries use the official language for that country.  If you want the Optimizer to use English for all rulesets, then click on Click for English-Only Version, on the top-left corner of the page (or go directly to http://lyncoptimizer.com/english.htm).

When you run the Optimizer script for the first time, it will create a site-level dial plan with normalization rules for the desired country.  When you run the Optimizer script additional times, using scripts generated for different countries, it will detect the existence of a site-level dial plan and will create a user-level dial plan with normalization rules appropriate for that country.

Assign the user-level dial plan to the appropriate users and they will be able to dial phone numbers as they are accustomed to.  Continuing the previous example, US users will dial local and national numbers using either 10 or 11 digits, and international calls starting with 011.  UK users will dial local numbers using 7+ digits, national numbers starting with a 0, and international numbers with 00.  The UK users won't be aware that when they dial a 7 digit local number, it actually gets dialed out from the US Lync server as 01144xxxxxxx.  

Again, thanks to Pat Richard for the feedback and the suggestion, and for being the first person to actually give me a Paypal donation!