Exchange 2007 UM - Transfer to Voicemail

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I was recently working with a Customer who wanted to transfer calls to voicemail directly without ringing the phone first. We discussed a couple different options.

1. Adding additional EUM Proxy Address to each users mailbox.  

This would give the flexibility of routing a call directly to Voicemail for any user without ringing the phone line. 

The down side to this approach is having to assign and remember two extensions for each user. Also having to route additional extensions thru the phone switch / PBX to UM for each user.

 

2. Route calls through the PBX with Diversion / History-Info to UM. 

This can be implemented by creating an extension such as 7XXXX. So any extension with a preceding '7' would get routed with Diversion / History-Info to UM.

Example from a Asterisk PBX might look like this:

exten => _7XXXX,1,Answer
exten => _7XXXX,n,SipAddHeader (Diversion:<tel:${EXTEN:1}>)
exten => _7XXXX,n,Dial(SIP/EXCH_UM/${SA-NUM})
exten => _7XXXX,n,Busy

Again this solution would require some programming from the PBX in order to implement this solution. This would not require any additional configuring on Exchange UM to implement this solution.

3. Create an Auto Attendant that only forwards calls to Exchange UM for voicemail.  

This is done by creating an Auto Attendant, using your normal process. But I will take you through how this gets created and what the customer discovered that works for them.

New-UMAutoAttendant -Name VoiceMail -SpeechEnabled $False -Status Enabled -UMDialPlan PBXDial -PilotIdentifierList 4606

This will create your Auto Attendant, but we will still need to make a couple more modifications to Auto Attendant. 

Set-UMAutoAttendant -Identity VoiceMail -AllowExtensions $False -CallSomeoneEnabled $False -SendVoiceMsgEnabled $True -NameLookupEnabled $False

When calling into the Auto Attendant now you will hear the following:

"Welcome to the Microsoft Exchange Auto Attendant. Enter the extension for the person you are calling."

When you dial the Extension / Voicemail Number. You will then be taken directly to Voicemail with out ringing any phone lines.

In the customers environment, they now call an extension associated with the newly created Auto Attendant. They are prompted for a users extension. Then transferred to the users Mailbox to leave a message.

I must give credit to the Customer for coming up with Option 3. This seemed to answer their needs and work in their environment.