Bulletin Board Voicemail Box

[OldPhoneGuy]

Looking to do something that should be simple here. On our old voicemail system I was able to create "Bulletin Board" mailboxes, mailboxes that were able to play a message to the caller, but would not allow a caller to leave a message. We use these mailboxes to provide callers with information. Has anybody been successful in making this work with ShoreTel, or must I use a spare Auto Attendent to accomplish this?

Thanks...

[phoneguy]

BB mailboxes

Just use an AA mailbox. Set it to repeat prompt on timeout and set the timeout to 3.

[OldPhoneGuy]

Thanks... That's kind of what I figured, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

[aclements]

Depending on what you need (and what version you are running) there are two ways to do this.

If you want a non-admin to be able to change the message regularly, and you are running anything older than ShoreTel 7, you can accomplish this with some user group and COS settings. If you are running ShoreTel 7 or newer, or you don’t need the message to be updated by someone without Director access, you should just use an Auto Attendant.
An auto attendant doesn’t require any extra licenses, and can be played locally from any VM server.

If you do need to use a mailbox, it does take up a license, and of course won’t work across sites if your WAN is down. Still, if you want to do it this way, what you need to do is create a User Group just for this type of mailbox, Set COS-Voice Mail to a COS that has incoming message length set to 0, incoming max messages set to 0, and outgoing message length set to whatever value you want to allow.

Create an extension, assign it to this user group, and record the outgoing message.

Then when this extension is called, the caller hears the message, then is transferred to the site’s default Auto Attendant.

You may also want to adjust the Call forwarding settings for the new extension, so the caller doesn’t have to wait 3 rings.

[OldPhoneGuy]

Thanks. I had tried setting up a mailbox as you describe before. Works okay but I don't much care for being dumped to a default attendant at the end of the message. Looks like I will stick with using auto attendants for bulletin boards. Thanks again.