ServiceDesk 4.8.237 Update 11/28/21

This involves the Shift-F7 form, and a picture is all that's needed:

This feature, first announced here, is pretty fantastic.

We recently realized it could be made better.

The reason, in particular, is because the validation info that comes back from Twilio (which provides the service we use for this) contains much more info, than simply indicating if the number is currently valid and connected.

So now, if you manually invoke an ad hoc request for a telephone number validation (just do a Ctrl-Click on a telephone number in a JobRecord or Callsheet; a ToolTip will guide if you float your mousepointer over a telephone number box), the system will provide you with available added information:

It's somewhat like a reverse phone lookup, but even better.

I (Glade) felt particularly impelled to add this feature when my wife called to say she'd received a call from our local utility, threatening to turn off our power if we did not immediately provide payment on our (supposedly) past due account. The scam caller had given her a callback number, which my wife provided to me. I wanted to find information on that number. This new/extended feature did not yet exist, so I hacked in the program code for immediate use, to get the same further info that's now directly available.

With the further info that is now directly available, here's what's revealed about the callback number that was left by the scammer:

What you see above basically means that all identifying information has been stripped from the number. "TOLLFREE" as the Caller Name is of course meaningless, and NULL for both the Line Type and Line Carrier are meaningless as well. Sure signs of a scam caller.

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False Negatives:

When doing this work, we incidentally discovered that in some instances a number can be valid and connected, yet the applicable carrier has not reported it back to the general system as being connected. So, we added an enhancement to better deal with that circumstance:

The system will, of course, behave according to user choice (i.e., mark the telephone number as having been validated if indeed that is the choice).