Telephone office service assist and handoff

In a telephone system comprising a plurality of telephone offices, a data base and data links interconnecting the offices and data base, a method of sharing call processing operations between offices with respect to a given call to a customer, comprising the steps of

• transmitting a request, including an identification of the customer, for call processing instructions from a serving office to the data base in response to receipt of a call at the serving office,
• at the data base,
• executing a customer program to determine how to process the call,
• determining if the serving office has all call processing capabilities to complete the call according to the customer program,
• if the serving office is unable to complete the call according to the customer program, selecting a second office from information stored at the data base that should be able to so complete the call, and
• transmitting a destination number of the second office to the serving office, and
• at the serving office,
• routing the call to the destination number of the second office for completion of the call.

A method of controlling the operations of a telephone office serving a call to obtain call processing feature capability otherwise unavailable at the serving telephone office, comprising the steps of

• interrogating a file associated with a specific customer in response to a call to the customer, the file containing instructions specifying the performance and order of performance of ones of a plurality of independent call processing primitives for processing the call in accordance with the customer file,
• determining if the serving office is able to perform all the primitives required by the customer file,
• if the serving office is unable to perform a required primitive, selecting a second office able to perform the primitive unavailable in the serving office,
• transferring control of the call to the second office and transmitting information to the second office informing it to execute the primitive unavailable at the serving office.

In a telephone system comprising a plurality of telephone offices, a data base and data links interconnecting the offices and data base, a method of sharing call processing operations between offices with respect to a given call to a customer, comprising the steps of

• transmitting a request, including an identification of the customer, for call processing instructions from a serving office to the data base in response to receipt of a call to the customer at the serving office,
• at the data base,
• interrogating a customer file to determine how to process the call,
• determining if the serving office has all call processing capabilities to complete the call according to the customer file,
• if the serving office is unable to complete the call according to the customer file, selecting a second office from information stored at the data base that should be able to so complete the call, and
• transmitting a destination number of the second office to the serving office, and
• at the serving office,
• routing the call to the destination number of the second office for completion of the call.