Don’t you feel annoyed when you have to dial multiple contact numbers of a friend to get in touch with him?

Now days, many of you have multiple contact numbers. For example, you may have different contact number for home telephone, work telephone and mobile. And in order to get in touch with you, it may be necessary for me to dial each of these different numbers separately until you answer one of the devices.

Additionally, a family may have a home phone, two work phones, two cell phones, two mobile phones and two email addresses. Again if a doctor or security officer wants to get in touch with family, he must call all of them separately until one is answered.

To solve this problem Microsoft has invented a cloud based universal phone number. They get a patent application granted for this invention whose details can be found here.

The universal phone number will be a single contact number for members of a family or employees of a department.Phone calls, text messages, emails and voice mails sent on the universal phone number will automatically be routed to the communication devices of the members of a family or employee of a department. Moreover, none of the family member/employee has to compromise with the privacy of his/her contact numbers, emails, voice mails or the like.

What does it mean?

It simply means that now in order to connect with you I don’t need to call on all of your different numbers separately. You have a universal number and I will dial that to get in touch with you.

How Microsoft’s Cloud Based Universal Phone Number does this?

This cloud based service of Microsoft will be connected with internet and with the telephonic communication system as well. It will route the emails and VOIP of the members to their devices by using internet and SMS and phone calls will be routed using telephonic communication system.

As there will be multiple members of a single universal phone number, hence to route an incoming call or email to the right device, each of the member has to provide his contact list detail and his email addresses. Moreover, no one has to worry about privacy as the universal phone number will keep the contact list of each member private.

Rules for Routing the Calls

Each member has to define rules for routing incoming calls and emails. Let suppose you have an official universal phone number that is being used by all employees of your department. Therefore, depending upon your schedule you can set rules for routing of calls and emails.

For example, you can set that between 9am to 7pm, all calls should be routed to your work phone. And after 7pm all calls should be routed to the voice mail box.

You can set additional rules for special contacts. For example, you can set a rule that if after 7pm, if your family members or your boss tries to get in touch with you, then the incoming call should be routed to your work phone and as well as your Smartphone, but if anyone else calls the universal phone number after 7:00 pm, then the call should be routed directly to voice mail and no device should receive the call.

Universal Voice Mail box

Apart from this the universal phone number also generates notification when a call is missed and a universal voice mail box will also be provided for a scenario when the incoming call is not answered. The universal mailbox will save the time that use to get wasted while trying to check multiple voicemails to determine who has called.

Microsoft is a giant of cloud computing who has an investment of $15 billion in cloud infrastructure to date. This cloud based universal phone number is surely a great invention. However, the question, as usual, is how well it can execute it.

Do tell us your views in comments below.

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