School Closing Voicemail

[bheft]

Does anyone know how to change a voicemail greeting to closed greeting manually. We would like for our transportation department to be able to switch to either closed greeting or alternate greeting when we have weather related delay/closing. Currently I can only see how to change to the standard or alternate greeting, and I would be wonderful if the department heads didn't have re-record that greeting every time schools are closed. Any suggestions?

[Vaijanath Sonvane]

Hi,

Only Standard or Alternate greetings can be used to update the recordings on the fly to play emergency/weather related messages. You can also use Closed greeting but someone need to change the schedule manually. 

[lindborg]

a better design is to use the "route from next" routing rule option - we put it in there for "snow day" type scenarios for schools, although not a lot of folks know about it.

Short version you create a routing rule for direct and forwarded calls that goes to a call handler that has an active alternate greeting that's set to blank.  The routing rule should be the first one processed   In this setup it's effectively a no op and inbound calls just continue on processing as normal.

If you have an outage you simply record the alternate greeting for that handler (or user if you like, works the same) and all inbound calls will hear that message no matter what (forwarded or direct) and THEN continue on processing the call as normal.  So if there's a closure for whatever reason, anyone calling into the VM system no matter what their purpose will hear about it.

Lots easier than mass-changing everyone's greetings through the entire system...

[Gregory Brunn]

Beat me to it. This would be what I would do for this.

[TONY SMITH]

"Currently I can only see how to change to the standard or alternate greeting, and I would be wonderful if the department heads didn't have re-record that greeting every time schools are closed. Any suggestions?"
Maybe I misunderstand, but surely you can swap to Alternate Greeting without re-recording it.

[bheft]

You can switch to the alternate greeting easily, but that alternate greeting and main greeting are the only ones that the user can swap between themselves. I was basically asking if it was possible to have more than the two greetings be swappable. For example the closed greeting, but the closed greeting can only be activated by changing hours of operation in the UCM. Does that make sense?

[Gregory Brunn]

Yup makes sense did you try the above suggestions and did they work for you?

If so mark the question answered to close the thread.