Can a voice mailbox be setup to have an outgoing message, but not accept one?

[akuhn]

Someone has suggested that when an employee departs, they don't want incoming voice mail messages to be left on that extension.  However, they do want an outgoing message on the extension that says, "As of August 20th, John Smith is no longer with the company."

While I am not intimate with the Basic (not enhanced or enterprise) VM on the 5000, my gut tells me that once you've recorded an outgoing message, you've turned on the ability for a caller to leave a message.  If you don't want a message to be left, then you have to turn off VM and just forward the extension - which I do not prefer in that I think it leaves bigger holes open than just leaving a message.

I'll just add that any messages left on the extension will be routed to an existing employee and are not lost.

Any 5000 pros want to weigh in?

Adam in DC

[acejavelin]

The easiest way to do this would be to create a Call Routing Announcement and set the timeout action appropriately (transfer to receptionist, disconnect, or whatever you want it to do after the message), set the day/night greetings to Audiotexg greeting you setup with the appropriate message, and forward the phone to the CRA extension. This will give you the desired result.

[akuhn]

"Easiest way" may be overstating it a bit.  I'm sure if I spent a few hours teaching myself how to do this, I could do it, but phones are just one small part of what I do.  Perhaps when things settle down and it's quiet, I can tackle this again.

Thanks.

[DND ON]

Disassociate the mailbox and designate it as “play-only” in programming.

[Tech Electronics]

Akuhn,

Just exactly how are people getting to this phone and subsequently to the voicemail box? Are you wanting to stop them from getting to the phone in order to leave a message or do you still want them to get to the phone, but not the ability to leave a message after you have given them your message, "John Doe not longer works here"?

Thanks,

TE

[akuhn]

TE.  The later scenario. 

[Tech Electronics]

Akuhn,

Alright, well the answer acejavelin gave is your best answer. Go to Voice Processor > Devices > Applications and then right-click in the open area to the right and select Call Routing Announcement.

Then we need to go to Digit Translations and tell the CRA what to do when we have finished playing our message to them. The options are flexible here, but if all you want to do is hangup on them then the default is fine and we don't need to do anything; otherwise pick a place to go on Timeout.

Now, within that CRA are two other folders Day Greeting and Night Greeting and by default they have a pre-recorded system message that we want to get rid of and put in our own unused recording number. Hopefully the original programmer used the last two digits of their CRAs to be the recording number, but this is not always the case. To find an unused recording number go here: Voice Processor > Application Related Information > Audiotex Recordings and look for the first recording number that isn't labeled and has 0 as the value for Recording Length.

Go back to the CRA Day and Night Greetings and put the same recording number in both. So if you are using Recording 003 then that would be in both Day and Night so it plays the same recording regardless of the systems Day/Night State.

To record this message though we will need to use the Administrators Mailbox so hopefully you know the password for it. To find the Administrator Mailbox go to Voice Processor and look about half-way down for System Administrator Mailbox. To record the recording number you picked dial your Voicemail Extension number, press * to tell it your a subscriber, dial the admin mailbox extension, put in the password for the administrator mailbox, and then press #. It should tell how full the hard drive is which lets you know you are in the admin mailbox. Next press 9, 3, 1 and then your recording number, if it is recording 003 then press 003 and it will prompt you to record the message and press # when you are done.

So now you have your brand new fancy CRA ready to go and if you dial the extension of the CRA from any phone it should play the message your recorded and then perform whatever action you told it to do on Timeout.

Now, we need to go to System > Phone-Related Information > System Forwarding Paths and find the first unused path that you can and remember the number. Next you need to put the extension number for your CRA on Forwarding Point 1 of that Forwarding Path.

Okay, so all we have left is to change the extensions forward path under the phone that you want to play this message. Go to System > Devices and Feature Codes > Phones [Endpoints|Stations] > Extension that you want to change > System Forwarding. Here is where you get a chance to change how forwarding works for the phone you want to change. We can delete all of the entries and put in a new one or you can just change the forwarding path number to the one you created or if there are less than 3 entries you can add yours to the top and leave the rest alone.

Most likely you will want to just add it to the top if there are less than three so when a new user comes in all you have to do is remove the entry and the phone will work as it did before. So if you choose that method then we just need to make sure that we go in and make a change to the criteria of when it should follow this path. To make it easy I would just set everything from Immediate on down to Yes, which means that the forwarding point will forward to your new CRA immediately on transfer or call to the phone in both DAY and NIGHT Mode. You can test this by dialing the extension since IC Calls is the last entry and the phone should follow to your CRA.

See, simple, nothing to it and easy as pie to setup; have fun!

Thanks,

TE