I’m a newbie in this position of working with our phone system. I realize that some of my questions may be obvious, so I’ll apologize in advance and thank you for any assistance you can offer.

First, the system details:

Phone System: NEC NEAX 2000 IPS
Voice Mail Card: 8 Port NEAXMail 8D
System Installation: 11/2003


I’m working for a non-profit in NYC. We’ve been having problems with our voice mail for the past 2-3 weeks.

We had our service person come out and defrag the voicemail drive. He also downloaded all of the files to analyze them. We shut the system down and when we turned it back on, the voicemail worked- for about 2 hours. Then it stayed down for the weekend.

Today, we shut down the system and restarted it. The voicemail worked for about 2 hours then went down again.

Our vendor is assuming it’s the voicemail card and is offering us a rebuilt voicemail card, rebuilding all the mailboxes and troubleshooting for around $3,000. (They said that if it’s not the vm card, they won’t charge us for it, but then the troubleshooting is just beginning. They’re pretty confident this will solve the problem.

As a non-profit, this is quite a large cost for us.

A few questions:

Does that price seem pretty reasonable for the repair of our voice mail?

Does this seem like a fluke that our voicemail card would go out after only 17 months?

I’m interested in finding the manuals for our system and try to start doing more of the ongoing maintenance inhouse. (Defragging the disc, etc.) Is it that hard to learn to do those things? What is a good resource for manuals?

Any thoughts and ideas you all have would be greatly appreciated.

Tommy