Need Phone Extension and Voicemail to be Managed by Other Users

[mbrown-revitycu]

Hello everyone.

Without going to deep into the details, I'll try to explain what we are needing to do.

Our organization participates in a public program to provide assistance to our members to address issues they have. The agency that manages the program requires that our organization have a dedicated phone line which the members may call to receive assistance.

We have placed a desk phone in the office where our primary manager for the program will be working, and this phone is associated with an extension for use with the program. The extension has been configured with a Unity voice mailbox. There will also be a second person working the program with the primary manager.

The biggest issue we have is that the primary manager will not always be in the office with the phone, and the secondary manager will rarely if ever be there. Even if they are, the phone won't really be answered as a live extension, it will really just be used to receive the voicemails.

So... what we want to do is find some way for the two managers of the program to be notified automatically when voicemails are left at that extension, whether or not they are present in the office. Can we configure it somehow so that any voicemails left at that extension will auto-forward to the two manager's normal extensions? We're still on v11.0 of CUCM and Unity, which is causing other headaches for us because we use Office 365 as our email provider, and the emails sent by Unity for new messages no longer work now that Microsoft has abandoned basic authentication, because 11.0 doesn't support modern auth.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you all may have, and if I can provide any additional detail I will do my best.

[Jonathan Schulenberg · Accepted solution]

If the users are willing to call into their voicemail to check messages Unity Connection has a feature for this exact use case: Dispatch Messaging. Create a voicemail distribution list with the relevant users, then a call handler (not a mailbox), and configure it to send messages to the distribution list with the “mark for dispatch” checkbox ticked. All DL members will receive a copy of the voicemail in their normal mailbox and be asked to accept/defer/decline the message. The first person to accept it then owns the message; CUC automatically rescinds it from the remaining DL members’ mailboxes.

If not, just use Message Actions and relay the message to a shared email mailbox. 

[mbrown-revitycu]

This nailed it for us. I tested it out with the two users, and any message left on the dedicated phone is sent right to their extension. From there they can listen, save, or forward the message as needed.

Thanks so much!

[mbrown-revitycu]

OK, another question has cropped up.

How do we record a custom greeting that will play at the dedicated extension when calls are received? It seems like we can't login to the phone to do it, because the phone doesn't have a user with a voicemail associated with it?

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

You as the admin can record or upload a greeting from the CUC Admin page of the Call Handler. You can even trigger an out-dial call to any CUCM DN (that CUC's Incoming CSS has access to), if you're working with a user to do it.

If users need to record & update the greeting periodically themselves you need to configure Greeting Administrator and assign users as Owners of the Call Handler. They call the Greeting Admin pilot (a new/dedicated extension you need to configure), sign in with their mailbox credentials, and are then prompted to enter the extension of the Call Handler they want to manage. If they're an Owner they will then be given options to record the various greetings and recorded name.

I'm not aware of a succinct Cisco guide for Greeting Admin setup so here is the first Google search result: https://unifiedguru.com/cisco-unity-connection-greeting-administrator/

[mbrown-revitycu]

When you say "can record or upload a greeting from the CUC Admin page of the Call Handler" are you referring to the page shown below, or a different page?

All I see there is a "play/record" button, which doesn't work because it wants to use Java and it fails even after I have installed Java.

Thanks!

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

Ah, that's right - 11.0 was still on the old Java Media Master applet. IIRC you can add CUC to the Java Exception Site List for the applet to load. Cisco replaced it with an HTML5 player starting in CUC 11.5.

PS- You really need to upgrade. CUC 11.0 hasn't had a software update - including for security vulnerabilities - since August 1st 2018 per the end of life notice. We're on 14.0 these days.

[mbrown-revitycu]

I ended up setting up the Greetings Administrator, so we finally have a custom greeting on that extension!

Oh man, we really would love to have upgraded by now. It's been a long list of reasons why we never have, starting with losing who knows how long to COVID. We are looking seriously at moving to Webex Cloud Calling here within the next few months, which will hopefully take care of us for the long haul.

Thank you again for all your help!