Re: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
Brian, I should concur with all that Dean raised. Given the experience level you describe and the clear business case for what you want to do, had you considered a commerical solution ? It would give you the peace of mind that all will work. It will also allow you to do many of the smaller features such as Outlook Integration in a click and drop manner as well as the group issues, setting up of voicemail delivery to email etc. See some other comments below. Steve (of course would be more than happy to promote our own but there are others you could do well to look at) - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Dean Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 9:01 PM Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Dean Thanks for responding. I have added more info in your reply. Right now we do not operate our own PBX or voice mail system. All of the service is provided by the telco. As a start I was wondering if I could simply put in asterisk to do just voicemail. I am assuming the telco can configure all the phone to automatically call forward to asterisk on no answer. If asterisk can handle this I am assuming that a user would just call some number to retiev voice mail. They would lose the call waiting light on their phone so the email notification of a voice mail would be necessary. ..Brian On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Dean Collins wrote: Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 00:04:36 -0500 From: Dean Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Hi Brian, I'm sure some other people will give you better answers but quick answers are; 1/ Depends on volume of message leaving/collection, is it in a single location? Multiple locations with multiple time zones? Two locations, one time zone. Could be two different systems since they are in two different cites connected by a 1G connection. Estimate the number of voicemails left per hour and reply with this. There are about 3000 phones. Some are busier than others os lets say 2 messages per phone per day. An they are mostly in the peak work day so lets say 500 per hour and the average length is 30 seconds. This is less than 5 concurrent messages :) I think you will need to have at least a T1 system because you are going to face some fairly extreme variations in usage. 2/ retrieve either via deliver to email or dial in to a number to collect voicemail via phone (or collect and play via a website) What does the conversion and how does one handle bulk updates? to users? How much control does the user have? How is a user informed that voicemail are waiting for them ? What is you existing PBX, how would the Asterisk based system interface with it ? does it use SIP ? or T1 interface ? How are the retrieving their voicemail now? Do you want to replicate this for ease of replacement as near as possible? Right now we are using the voice mail service provided by the teclo and are spending $0.06 per minute. The user connects to the voice mail by dialing *99 and entering a password on their office set or remoetely by dialing 123-MAIL on any phone (123 is the three digit prefix of their phone number) and then entering their password. They do not have any voice to email service today. If possible I would like to ease the transition if it can be done. Lots of stepswill follow discovery if it can be done. 3/ Not sure what you mean by tie in? How do you match a voice mail box to an email address? Can there be multiple email addresses for one voice mail box? You can program the Asterisk but with a good interface, click and drop. 4/ Sure, how do you have this configured at the moment? Why not replicate voicemail group delivery in the same format? Talkmail is a service provided by the telco where you group a bunch of numbers together so you can send the same message to all of them at the same time. Again it can be programmed but click and drop may be easier. Cheers, Dean -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:asterisk-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 4 November 2006 11:54 PM To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail I am totally ignorant about actually using asterisk for any purpose. I have read some of the docs but not all. I am currently doing a telephone audit for my company and one of the issues is voice mail. We are spending quit a bit of money with our telco for voice mail services and I was wondering about using asterisk as just a voice mail system. We are not quite ready to move to a full VOIP system yet but if I can get this system in place the VOIP will follow. Could I get
RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
Dean Thanks for responding. I have added more info in your reply. Right now we do not operate our own PBX or voice mail system. All of the service is provided by the telco. As a start I was wondering if I could simply put in asterisk to do just voicemail. I am assuming the telco can configure all the phone to automatically call forward to asterisk on no answer. If asterisk can handle this I am assuming that a user would just call some number to retiev voice mail. They would lose the call waiting light on their phone so the email notification of a voice mail would be necessary. ..Brian On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Dean Collins wrote: Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 00:04:36 -0500 From: Dean Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Hi Brian, I'm sure some other people will give you better answers but quick answers are; 1/ Depends on volume of message leaving/collection, is it in a single location? Multiple locations with multiple time zones? Two locations, one time zone. Could be two different systems since they are in two different cites connected by a 1G connection. Estimate the number of voicemails left per hour and reply with this. There are about 3000 phones. Some are busier than others os lets say 2 messages per phone per day. An they are mostly in the peak work day so lets say 500 per hour and the average length is 30 seconds. 2/ retrieve either via deliver to email or dial in to a number to collect voicemail via phone (or collect and play via a website) What does the conversion and how does one handle bulk updates? to users? How much control does the user have? How are the retrieving their voicemail now? Do you want to replicate this for ease of replacement as near as possible? Right now we are using the voice mail service provided by the teclo and are spending $0.06 per minute. The user connects to the voice mail by dialing *99 and entering a password on their office set or remoetely by dialing 123-MAIL on any phone (123 is the three digit prefix of their phone number) and then entering their password. They do not have any voice to email service today. If possible I would like to ease the transition if it can be done. Lots of stepswill follow discovery if it can be done. 3/ Not sure what you mean by tie in? How do you match a voice mail box to an email address? Can there be multiple email addresses for one voice mail box? 4/ Sure, how do you have this configured at the moment? Why not replicate voicemail group delivery in the same format? Talkmail is a service provided by the telco where you group a bunch of numbers together so you can send the same message to all of them at the same time. Cheers, Dean -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:asterisk-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 4 November 2006 11:54 PM To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail I am totally ignorant about actually using asterisk for any purpose. I have read some of the docs but not all. I am currently doing a telephone audit for my company and one of the issues is voice mail. We are spending quit a bit of money with our telco for voice mail services and I was wondering about using asterisk as just a voice mail system. We are not quite ready to move to a full VOIP system yet but if I can get this system in place the VOIP will follow. Could I get all 3000 phones (on 2 sites) or a large subset set to have a call forward no-answer feature set to call a number that would be answered by asterisk's voice mail. If so: 1. what hardware do I need to handle 3000 phones? 2. how would users retrieve their voice mail? 3. how does one tie voice mail into an e-mail address? Are their ways to do bulk updates for several thousand new users every year? 4. is there a feature what we call talk mail where you set up a group of phone numbers and send the same message to all of them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. .TIA Brian Kaye ...UNB ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
Hi Brian, Uhmmm as it appears you are using a centrex service from your telco (your comment about not having any pabx) I need to ask this question..are you sure that under your current commercial arrangements you are actually allowed to continue to use the telco as your centrex provider but not use them for your voicemail? Also if you decided to use a separate asterisk server for your voicemail service how would calls be transferred to this number? Would the carrier allow you to host and asterisk service off some of your existing centrex extensions? Would this incur a cost or similar. I think for your bosses 'discovery' report the answer would be Yes to can asterisk be used as just a voicemail server Yes to people can operate with the same methods of retrival they currently do Yes to people can also retrieve via additional methods such as web or email And finally yes this will save us money in the longer term at 6c per minute currently. The next step should be 1a/ You boss decides You or someone in your team skill up in asterisk Or Regards, Dean Collins Cognation Pty Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-212-203-4357 Ph -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, 5 November 2006 3:02 PM To: Dean Collins Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Dean Thanks for responding. I have added more info in your reply. Right now we do not operate our own PBX or voice mail system. All of the service is provided by the telco. As a start I was wondering if I could simply put in asterisk to do just voicemail. I am assuming the telco can configure all the phone to automatically call forward to asterisk on no answer. If asterisk can handle this I am assuming that a user would just call some number to retiev voice mail. They would lose the call waiting light on their phone so the email notification of a voice mail would be necessary. ..Brian On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Dean Collins wrote: Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 00:04:36 -0500 From: Dean Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Hi Brian, I'm sure some other people will give you better answers but quick answers are; 1/ Depends on volume of message leaving/collection, is it in a single location? Multiple locations with multiple time zones? Two locations, one time zone. Could be two different systems since they are in two different cites connected by a 1G connection. Estimate the number of voicemails left per hour and reply with this. There are about 3000 phones. Some are busier than others os lets say 2 messages per phone per day. An they are mostly in the peak work day so lets say 500 per hour and the average length is 30 seconds. 2/ retrieve either via deliver to email or dial in to a number to collect voicemail via phone (or collect and play via a website) What does the conversion and how does one handle bulk updates? to users? How much control does the user have? How are the retrieving their voicemail now? Do you want to replicate this for ease of replacement as near as possible? Right now we are using the voice mail service provided by the teclo and are spending $0.06 per minute. The user connects to the voice mail by dialing *99 and entering a password on their office set or remoetely by dialing 123-MAIL on any phone (123 is the three digit prefix of their phone number) and then entering their password. They do not have any voice to email service today. If possible I would like to ease the transition if it can be done. Lots of stepswill follow discovery if it can be done. 3/ Not sure what you mean by tie in? How do you match a voice mail box to an email address? Can there be multiple email addresses for one voice mail box? 4/ Sure, how do you have this configured at the moment? Why not replicate voicemail group delivery in the same format? Talkmail is a service provided by the telco where you group a bunch of numbers together so you can send the same message to all of them at the same time. Cheers, Dean -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:asterisk-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 4 November 2006 11:54 PM To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail I am totally ignorant about actually using asterisk for any purpose. I have read some of the docs but not all. I am currently doing a telephone audit for my company and one of the issues is voice mail. We are spending quit a bit of money with our telco for voice mail services and I was wondering about using asterisk as just
RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Dean Collins wrote: Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 15:21:19 -0500 From: Dean Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Hi Brian, Uhmmm as it appears you are using a centrex service from your telco (your comment about not having any pabx) yes. I need to ask this question..are you sure that under your current commercial arrangements you are actually allowed to continue to use the telco as your centrex provider but not use them for your voicemail? Voice mail is a separately billed service that some lines have and some don't. We pay $0.06 per minute to use it. Its cash cow for the telco and a big bill for us. Also if you decided to use a separate asterisk server for your voicemail service how would calls be transferred to this number? I am assuming there is a feature to transfer a call when the phoen does not ring after a certain number of rings. But I don't thing I know to handle getting voice mail if the line is busy. Would the carrier allow you to host and asterisk service off some of your existing centrex extensions? Would this incur a cost or similar. I am sure there would be a cost whatever we had them do. I was hoping to go a little further if possible to install a server and a t1 circuit with enough capacity to handle the load. I think for your bosses 'discovery' report the answer would be Yes to can asterisk be used as just a voicemail server Yes to people can operate with the same methods of retrieval they currently do Yes to people can also retrieve via additional methods such as web or email And finally yes this will save us money in the longer term at 6c per minute currently. The next step should be 1a/ You boss decides You or someone in your team skill up in asterisk Or Does the asterisk communitty have a presence at any of the IP telephony conference? ..Brian Regards, Dean Collins Cognation Pty Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1-212-203-4357 Ph -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, 5 November 2006 3:02 PM To: Dean Collins Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Dean Thanks for responding. I have added more info in your reply. Right now we do not operate our own PBX or voice mail system. All of the service is provided by the telco. As a start I was wondering if I could simply put in asterisk to do just voicemail. I am assuming the telco can configure all the phone to automatically call forward to asterisk on no answer. If asterisk can handle this I am assuming that a user would just call some number to retiev voice mail. They would lose the call waiting light on their phone so the email notification of a voice mail would be necessary. ..Brian On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Dean Collins wrote: Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 00:04:36 -0500 From: Dean Collins [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail Hi Brian, I'm sure some other people will give you better answers but quick answers are; 1/ Depends on volume of message leaving/collection, is it in a single location? Multiple locations with multiple time zones? Two locations, one time zone. Could be two different systems since they are in two different cites connected by a 1G connection. Estimate the number of voicemails left per hour and reply with this. There are about 3000 phones. Some are busier than others os lets say 2 messages per phone per day. An they are mostly in the peak work day so lets say 500 per hour and the average length is 30 seconds. 2/ retrieve either via deliver to email or dial in to a number to collect voicemail via phone (or collect and play via a website) What does the conversion and how does one handle bulk updates? to users? How much control does the user have? How are the retrieving their voicemail now? Do you want to replicate this for ease of replacement as near as possible? Right now we are using the voice mail service provided by the teclo and are spending $0.06 per minute. The user connects to the voice mail by dialing *99 and entering a password on their office set or remoetely by dialing 123-MAIL on any phone (123 is the three digit prefix of their phone number) and then entering their password. They do not have any voice to email service today. If possible I would like to ease the transition if it can be done. Lots of stepswill follow discovery if it can be done. 3/ Not sure what you mean by tie in? How do you match a voice mail box to an email address? Can there be multiple email addresses for one voice mail box? 4/ Sure, how do you have
RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
The next step should be 1a/ You boss decides You or someone in your team skill up in asterisk Or Does the asterisk communitty have a presence at any of the IP telephony conference? ..Brian You just missed it check out www.astricon.net it was 2 weeks ago in Dallas. (but yes Digium were at VON and other events this year as well). Cheers, Dean ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
[asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
I am totally ignorant about actually using asterisk for any purpose. I have read some of the docs but not all. I am currently doing a telephone audit for my company and one of the issues is voice mail. We are spending quit a bit of money with our telco for voice mail services and I was wondering about using asterisk as just a voice mail system. We are not quite ready to move to a full VOIP system yet but if I can get this system in place the VOIP will follow. Could I get all 3000 phones (on 2 sites) or a large subset set to have a call forward no-answer feature set to call a number that would be answered by asterisk's voice mail. If so: 1. what hardware do I need to handle 3000 phones? 2. how would users retrieve their voice mail? 3. how does one tie voice mail into an e-mail address? Are their ways to do bulk updates for several thousand new users every year? 4. is there a feature what we call talk mail where you set up a group of phone numbers and send the same message to all of them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. .TIA Brian Kaye ...UNB ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
RE: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail
Hi Brian, I'm sure some other people will give you better answers but quick answers are; 1/ Depends on volume of message leaving/collection, is it in a single location? Multiple locations with multiple time zones? Estimate the number of voicemails left per hour and reply with this. 2/ retrieve either via deliver to email or dial in to a number to collect voicemail via phone (or collect and play via a website) How are the retrieving their voicemail now? Do you want to replicate this for ease of replacement as near as possible? 3/ Not sure what you mean by tie in? 4/ Sure, how do you have this configured at the moment? Why not replicate voicemail group delivery in the same format? Cheers, Dean -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:asterisk-users- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, 4 November 2006 11:54 PM To: asterisk-users@lists.digium.com Subject: [asterisk-users] Newbie questions about Voice mail I am totally ignorant about actually using asterisk for any purpose. I have read some of the docs but not all. I am currently doing a telephone audit for my company and one of the issues is voice mail. We are spending quit a bit of money with our telco for voice mail services and I was wondering about using asterisk as just a voice mail system. We are not quite ready to move to a full VOIP system yet but if I can get this system in place the VOIP will follow. Could I get all 3000 phones (on 2 sites) or a large subset set to have a call forward no-answer feature set to call a number that would be answered by asterisk's voice mail. If so: 1. what hardware do I need to handle 3000 phones? 2. how would users retrieve their voice mail? 3. how does one tie voice mail into an e-mail address? Are their ways to do bulk updates for several thousand new users every year? 4. is there a feature what we call talk mail where you set up a group of phone numbers and send the same message to all of them? Any help would be greatly appreciated. .TIA Brian Kaye ...UNB ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users ___ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
