sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Toshiba Telephones & Systems on the MAS and Auto Attendants

I work for a school district that has 9 CIX systems connected via StrataNet across our fiber WAN. We have one MAS with 24 licensed ports and enough IP ports across all the systems to interconnect them. We wanted to setup at least one auto attendant per site eventually, with our larger sites (high school, career and technology center, and board office) to have multi-level menus. I am told by Toshiba support via a conversation with our vendor that we need to assign port groups to each auto attendant in order for the instructional greeting to work...

I'd like to know how you all have setup systems you've dealt with when it comes to auto attendants? Especially when it comes to doing multi-level auto attendant menus and setting up at least a couple auto attendants at more than one site with one MAS.

Any help with the MAS or other Auto Attendant alternatives would be greatly appreciated.

Tell your vendor to look in the FYI web knowledgebase for Multiple Tenant Application with port sharing on the Stratagy ES/iES. It is kind of a pain to setup.

In my opinion the problem with the desin of the Stratagy voicemail is the way the system always wants to redirect callers back to the default message box on entry errors. This is based on the answering box for each port, default 990.

I've just contacted him to let him know. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll post back as things progress.

That is how I have setup multiple tenants on the IES

Apparently that FYI is the same one we referenced yesterday during the meeting.

Under eManager you go to
Stratagy ES -> VM System -> VM Ans Methods
then setup the "Greeting User Agent" for each answer method. Then goto VM Voice Ports and set the Answer Method for each port. That's the way we have it setup now and how it limits us to only a one-tier/level per Answer Method.

Is this essentially how it *only* works or is there another way of doing multiple levels/tiers?

You see the limitation here for large implementations if this is the only way, right? We've already invested tens of thousands into this MAS and only now am I finding out that we can't handle multi-level/tier menus for all of our sites. It's incredibly disappointing since we've already put in so much investment into this box.

I hope I'm misunderstanding how this MAS works. if so, please help me clarify what I'm getting wrong.

You arent really limited to one tier. For instance, following the afformentioned knowledgebase article, you set up your different AA's and then choose your options, ex. press 1 for reception, 2 for accounting, etc. Your option 2 could go to another mb in the same group and have another greeting, press one for billing, 2 for payroll, etc. Hopefully this is what you mean by tiers or I am way off.

I am familiar with the multi tenant set up and agree with newtecky on the limitation of the application. According to the article, you must set your vm ports up into different groups and create seperate answer methods for each group. This not only divides your vm port resources, but it is the only way to prohibit users/callers from going to into mb's/AA's that they are not supposed to get to. In your case with 24 ports, this may not be a big deal to seperate that into two groups with 12 ports each but according to your original post it looks like you are wanting at least 9 different groups. Thats just not feasible.

@RRino: We've tried that here and setup another MB with a menu and instructional greeting selected. The problem with that, though, is that the instructional greeting never works without the MB being assigned to an Answering Method.

Is there another way of getting the instructional greeting to kick in for a MB not assigned to an answering method?

Set up a Pilot DN to ring to a mailbox say 890

Set up mailbox 890 with DND and RNA chain to AutoAttendant. You should be good

Also check off the take messages box so it does not try to take a message

That's awesome! I swear we tried this and I had no luck...

One thing, however. When I dial the pilot DN to go to the auto attendant I get a "Thank you for calling" in the default Toshiba voice before it plays my Instructional Greeting. Can I disable that?

Fixed it myself. Just set the selected greeting and recorded it as nothing, works great.

Thank you guys, especially breed, for all the help. Hopefully as I setup these auto attendants I won't be back here posting my woes!