Since the Unified Communication (UC) concept became reality, we have seen a major player Microsoft made its UC products evolved from LCS to OCS, to Lync, and merged with Skype. Recently, as part of Office 365, Skype for Business has a new name called Teams.
As a user, once Skype has been installed on the workstation and integrated phone capabilities, we saw the traditional telephone set being removed from the desk including the legendary Nortel Meridian phone many of us have been using for decades, we knew that the change is inevitable.
But if we make phone calls more than 10 times a day, we will soon find a problem – the layout of the keypad on the phone and the layout of the computer numpad are not the same. The numbers are in different position.
Here is a traditional telephone keypad – numbers ascend from top to bottom, with star and number signs.
Below is a standard numpad on a computer keyboard – numbers ascend from bottom up, there is no number sign. Be very careful if you blind dial a number starts with 3-7-7. If your fingers still remember the phone layout, you will need to explain a bit on the phone with the agent.
So, unless you click the shortcut in an email or meeting invitation, if you need to dial the phone number on the keypad, be careful. You have to retrain your brain to treat the phone numbers the same way as you key in numbers in a spreadsheet.
Moreover, when you key in the conference number you need to decided how to key in the pound key (number sign) at the end. I believe most of us will use a mouse to click on the soft keyboard.
Add more complicity to that, you will notice the letters on the keys are also different.
Who to blame? I think that would be the inventor of electronic calculator. Without research, I guess that was where the computer numpad inherited from. I don’t know, maybe the phone keypad was invented first after people were tired of rotary phone dial. The standard organizations like IEEE didn’t foresee the necessity of united numpad.
Process Studio 