Our phone setup has become difficult to maintain, and I need a way to modernize it without disrupting users. Every employee receives a company mobile phone and a physical office phone with its own number. Clients often know only the office number, so since 2020 we have forwarded each office line to the employee's company mobile phone. When someone leaves, we retire their mobile device, reassign the office number to a new employee, and set up forwarding again. The mobile phones are managed through Verizon, while the desk phones and forwarding are handled by an outdated third-party vendor.
The larger problem is our company contact list. New employees are given a shared Exchange public folder called "CONTACT LIST," which someone manually copies into their Outlook contacts during onboarding. Existing users never receive updates when employees leave or when office numbers are reassigned. As a result, an employee may call a newly hired colleague and see the previous owner's name displayed because their locally copied contact list still contains the old information.
This process is clearly unsustainable. I'm trying to decide whether we should clean up the stale contacts for existing employees, replace the shared contact-list process entirely, and possibly move to a different phone system. Ideally, every employee would be able to search current company contact information from their company phone, office numbers could be reassigned easily, and changes would automatically appear for everyone without manually copying or maintaining contact lists. What would be a sensible architecture and migration plan for this?
2 Answers
Put each employee’s office and mobile numbers in the directory attached to your identity system, such as Active Directory or Microsoft 365. Outlook, Teams, and other directory-aware applications can then display the current information without relying on a copied personal contact list. This gives you a central source of truth and lets directory searches show both numbers.
The forwarding setup and split vendor ownership are probably the bigger long-term problem. Move the office numbers to a cloud PBX or unified communications platform that can ring an app on the company mobile device directly. Microsoft Teams Phone could fit if you already use Microsoft 365; other hosted systems can provide the same model. Then offboarding becomes disabling the user, removing their device access, and reassigning the number through one administration portal instead of coordinating multiple vendors.
You also may find that only reception, conference rooms, or other shared spaces need physical desk phones. Everyone else can use the desktop and mobile applications, which eliminates much of the provisioning work and avoids forwarding chains.
A Teams-based phone system has been suggested here before, and it would solve many of these operational problems even though the company is reluctant to adopt it. Centralizing number ownership and making the mobile app the endpoint seems much more manageable than continuing with the current arrangement.
That directory information is already present. The issue is that many users still have old entries copied into their personal Outlook contacts, so those stale records continue to override or confuse the current directory data.