Enum anyone ?
I’ll bet very few of you out there will have heard of ‘enum’ other than in coding terms as in ‘enumerating’ over a collection or array. Well I’m stating for the record now, in a very few short years it’ll be the glue that binds you to your ‘Uniform Resource Identifier’ or URI.
At the moment we all probably have a phone number, some of us will have a mobile and a very few of us might have a VoIP address for internet-routed calls to your VoIP (typically Skype but other services are available) phone. The real problem is that there’s almost no way of making this information follow you around unless with every email signature or business card you have great big list of contact details !
Enter ‘ENUM’ (Depending where you look – Electronic NUmber Mapping System aka TElephone NUmber Mapping) . This works on almost the same principle as DNS does for web address on the internet.
The end result is that by entering a ‘NAPTR’ record into the DNS entries on your domain when someone calls on your main phone number, if it finds you unavailable it can do a lookup for your next preferred means of communications which might be your mobile, then that’s not available it follow you down to your VoIP number and finally if this still can’t get to you it’ll drop you an email with the voicemail of the call as an attachment…all transparently and without you having to look up/remember a series of numbers.
This is the future..and I like it !
