sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems VoiceMail Systems and Programming Voice Mail Ports

On average how many phones should you have per voice mail port?

I always check to see if the voicemail is going to be used as an Auto Attendant as well. If it is going to be strictly voicemail, I never go lower than 4 ports for even the smallest system. I've had 100 or so users on a 4 port system (not my choice) and never heard from them as far as problems go. Then I've had some people with 50 people have issues with 8 port voicemail systems getting busy signals.

It does really depend on what your utilizing the voice mail system for.

Is there going to be full time auto attendant?
....if so how many hoops are you creating to make your callers jump thru?

....or how long are they going to have to listen to your ramble of a main greeting?

How many lines will be answered by voice mail?

Are your people going to be answering transfered calls from voice mail to them or are the calls going to roll back to voice mail to be answered with the users greeting?

How many users/mailboxes?

How many are heavy users of voice mail?
.....average users?
....light users?

Are you using Unified Messaging?

Are you using Faxing?

These and many more/other questions make a simple answer just obsolete.

And by the way there is a Erlang formula for this purpose but it doesn't really work as well as you'd think.

Also, depending on your voice mail system - are you using any ports/boxes for ACD or UCD announcements?
Look at what the cost is going to be to add later as opposed to provisioning at the get go and if there is no difference I would err on the low side with the caveat to the customer that they may need to add ports and the price for doing so.