What is the MSISDN number?

In Customer records (and Personnel too), you'll see a non-editable field called MSISDN.  This is simply a technical term for a standardised version of the mobile phone number.

Phone(mob) vs MSISDN

In the Phone(mob) field (and other phone numbers) you can enter a number in the format that makes sense to you.  You can use spaces, dashes, and brackets to make it more readable.

For example in Australia, we would typically say a numbers like "0405321456" as "oh-four-oh-five three-two-one four-five-six", so we write it as "0405 321 456".  Grouping numbers like this makes them more readable, and can help reduce entry errors.&nbs A number like "0405 321 4566" just looks wrong, and will hopefully get picked up as incorrect.

The MSISDN number gets rid of all those punctuation and spaces, and also tacks the country code on the front.  For Australia the country code is "61", so our number "0405 321 456" becomes "61405321456" (note that the leading "0" is dropped).

It's not so easy to read, but it's perfect for the system when sending SMS messages.

Using MSISDN for searching

Because the MSISDN is standardised and doesn't have extra characters it makes it very useful for searching.

This can be handy of you want to search for a customer based on their mobile number.  Normal searching can be difficult if the numbers aren't entered exactly as you expect.

For our example number, "0405 321 456" might have been entered as any of these...

• 0405 321 456
• 0405321456
• (04) 0532 1456
• +61 405-321-456
• and so on

Trying to search for "0405 321 456" will not find a customer who has "(04) 0532 1456" in the mobile field.

But MSISDN is standard, so you can simply search the MSISDN field for "61405321456" and all of the above numbers would be found.  You can simplify it a little by using the wild-card in your search "*405321336".

Searching Phone Numbers using Wildcards

Other phone numbers don't have a standardised format, so when searching you may need to get clever and use wildcards.

Let's look at all those weirdly formatted phone numbers from the previous example...

• 0405 321 456
• 0405321456
• (04) 0532 1456
• +61 405-321-456

They are actually all the same phone number, just with some other characters interspersed. One way that would find all of these numbers is to allow interspersed characters after every digit. Something like this...

"*4*0*5*3*2*1*4*5*6*"