Our company phone system has become difficult to manage and causes stale contact information whenever office numbers are recycled. Every employee receives a company cellphone and a physical desk phone with its own office number. Since 2020, each office line has been forwarded to the employee's company cellphone, so clients can continue using the known office number without learning the employee's mobile number.
When someone leaves, their cellphone is retired, the desk phone is re-provisioned, and the office number is eventually assigned to someone else. The cellphones are managed by one provider, while the desk phones and forwarding are handled by a separate, outdated vendor.
The bigger issue is our internal contact-list process. New employees are given a copy of an Exchange public folder called "CONTACT LIST," which they drag into their Outlook contacts during onboarding. Existing users never receive reliable updates. As a result, an employee who joined years ago may still have a former employee's name attached to a recycled office number. When they call the new owner from their company cellphone, the caller ID can display the former employee's name, which is confusing and unprofessional.
Our directory information is already stored in Active Directory and available through tools such as Outlook and Teams, but that does not fix the outdated contacts copied into users' personal contact lists.
How should we handle the existing stale contacts? Should we attempt to clean everyone's address books, or simply stop using the public-folder process and let it age out? More importantly, what should replace it? We need every new employee to have current company contact information on their company cellphone, while allowing IT to recycle office numbers and have the updated owner reflected automatically. We are also open to replacing the current phone vendors with a cloud-based system if that would eliminate forwarding and simplify provisioning and offboarding.
2 Answers
The forwarding setup and the split between vendors are probably the root of the operational pain. Move the office numbers to a cloud PBX or unified communications platform, such as Teams Phone if your organization already uses Microsoft 365, or another managed business-phone service. The office number can ring the app on the employee’s company cellphone directly, without a separate forwarding chain. When someone leaves, disable their account and reassign the number from one administration portal. You may also discover that only reception areas, conference rooms, or other shared spaces still need physical desk phones.
Treat the directory as the source of truth instead of copying it into everyone’s personal contacts. Keep each employee’s office and mobile numbers current in your identity directory, then rely on the company directory in Outlook, Teams, or the chosen phone app for lookups. That prevents old contact records from becoming authoritative, although you may still need a one-time cleanup or replacement of the existing public-folder contacts.
The directory fields are already populated and available in Outlook and Teams. The problem is that users have old entries copied into their own contact lists, so those stale records override what people find in practice.
A cloud phone system has been suggested before, especially a Teams-based option, but leadership dislikes Teams. Even so, consolidating the numbers and provisioning into one platform seems like a much better long-term answer than continuing with the current process.