Life in the dorms

[tlevad]

Are there any suggested configurations for setting up mailboxes for two users who share the same phone? This is a dorm room setup where two roommates share the same phone and need two separate voicemail boxes. The leading candidate now is to have one key dialing set in each box where the first subscriber would record "You've reached Tim's voicemail box, to leave a message remain on the line and wait for the tone. To leave a message for my roommate press 1 at any time. The call would then be transferred to the mailbox of the other subscriber sharing that extension. Any other ideas on setting up this shared extension configuration?<br><br>

[#2]

I would suggest setting up the main subscriber greeting to allow caller input and allow transfers to other call handlers.
Ex. "You've reached our room, for Tony, press 1-for Vinnie press 2." After pressing one, the caller is sent to another mailbox greeting for Tony, and the same goes for Vinnie. I would set the main greeting to loop, however so it doesn't take a message after timing out.

[#3]

This was proposed as an idea, but wouldn't the use of call handlers exponentially increase the workload of the system admininstrator? I guess we could assign ownership of the call handlers to the subscribers themselves. I want to keep this as simple as possible and keep the load off the admin. If call handlers are taking the message are messages going to be delivered to exchange inboxes?

[#4]

If you've got calls for multiple people coming into the same phone you have to have some mechansim for routing it to the correct mailbox or have messages left for all the room mates in the room.

You can have the call handler route the messages left for it to a particular subscriber or distirbution list but this probably isn't your best move since you can't record greetings over the phone for call handlers, only via the SA.

Probably the simplest approach that wouldn't require call handlers and would be the least amount of work would be to designate one of the subscribers to be the primary and other room mates to be secondary. Setup the primary subscriber to use the extension of the phone such that calls that forward from that extension reach their mailbox. In their greeting they can record "to leave a message for bill, press 1, to leave a message for sam, press 2 etc....". If it's bill's box, have 1 set to take a message, 2 set to "send to greeting for" the mailbox for sam etc...

You have to setup the one key rules in the SA (i.e. you can't get at them in the AA or over the phone) so the admin overhead will be in creating that primary box. And of course calling in to check messages for the other room mates will be a pain if it auto logs into Bills mailbox when they hit the "messages" button so you'll probably want to configure the system such that all direct calls get the opening greeting and everyone has to sign in using *... don't want fights breaking out over who's the "alpha male" in the room or anything.

That's probably how I'd approach it. The other alternative requries creating mail users for each person and a call handler for each phone and using the call handler to route calls to each mailbox. The greeting for this handler would have to be recorded via the Sa, but of course the one key rules also have to be edited over the SA so I'm not sure how big of a deal that is. Seems like room mates might want to change their greeting a lot but perhaps the admin types don't want them to. Depends on what they want to do.


Jeff Lindborg
Unity Product Architect/Answer Monkey
Cisco Systems
lindborg@cisco.com
http://www.AnswerMonkey.net (new page for Unity support tools and scripts)

[#5]

Actually, you wouldn't need a call handler at all. Just set up the main greeting to transfer to the other two mailboxes via caller input. This would only require one more subscriber.

[tlevad]

Thanks for your help everyone. I don't have a roommate any more and my partner and I have separate phones now.