Abstract: During the occurrence of an incoming call to a portable handset within an in building telephone system, a method is disclosed for providing additional information about the calling party, beyond simply their name or number, to a display on the handset. The name or number of the calling party is extracted by a central switching controller and is used as a reference in the look up of additional calling party attributes from a database located within a personal computer connected to the central switching controller. If the name or number of the calling party is found in the database, a data session is started between the called handset and the database. Following the starting of the data session, the first attribute in the database for the calling party is written to the display of the called handset and additional attributes are offered to the user.

Abstract: During the occurrence of an incoming voice call to a portable telephone handset within an in building telephone system, a method is disclosed for offering the voice call while the called handset is in a data session with an application. In such a case, the data session is interrupted and the handset display and softkey information is saved to memory. The name or number of the calling party is then written to the display of the called handset while the incoming call is offered to the user. A call acceptance signal from the called handset results in the establishing of a voice communication connection between the handset and the calling party. Independent of whether the incoming call is accepted or rejected by the user of the called handset, the saved display and softkey information is restored to the called handset and the data session is resumed between the portable handset and the application once the selection is made.