The Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker Dial Plan

The Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker's dial plan engine was designed from the ground up to simplify the administration of common, real-world dialing behaviors. Conceptually, the dial plan engine allows administrators to define the rules by which dialed digit strings are built up, or broken down into "universal addresses". A universal address may be thought of as an E.164 number, although this is not strictly required. Universal numbers are required to be globally unique, not E.164-compliant.

These rules are then grouped into a foundation data structure in the Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker, the context. The concept of a context is fundamental to the operation of the Oracle Enterprise Communications Broker's dial plan configuration, and is discussed below.

The dial plan engine serves two purposes. First, it constructs universal addresses from input received. Second, it prepares egress translation from universal addresses into contextually-appropriate addresses based upon a message's destination. An example of the latter is the system creating a URI for a remote phone that needs to be addressed with four digits rather than a fully-qualified E.164 number.