Holiday greeting

General Help
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Hello all,

I’ve written up some instructions on how to add a holiday greeting to your system. While this seems to work fine I’m wondering if there are any better ways to do this? I looked about on the forums and could not find a definitive answer, most posts were a 2+ years old. The lack of current chatter on the topic makes me wonder if a better solution than mine already exists.

This can be extended out so the office records a generic

  • closed Mon announcement
  • closed Mon\Tue announcement
  • closed Thur\Fri announcement
  • closed Fri announcement

As the year goes on they can just plug in the appropriate announcement as long as the verbiage is generic (i.e “We’ll be closed on Monday for the holiday” vs “We’ll be closed on Monday for Ramadan”

In the forums I did see conversations about about tying into a smart calendar and then automating holiday greetings. Does anyone know what became of that idea (i.e already done or too difficult and dropped)

Holiday Greetings

The big picture is you add an Announcement before the main IVR. This is done a few days ahead of the event (steps 1-3) and then removed the day after the event (step 4).

In this example we will create an announcement for Thanksgiving using the following information:

  • Recording name – AnnTurkey
  • Announcement description – Turkey
  • main Time Condition – Daytime
  • a daytime IVR already exists
  • an evening IVR already exists

Step 1 – Record Message

  1. connect to the FreePBX web interface
  2. click on System Recordings option in the left hand column
  3. enter the extension you will be recording from, then press Go
  4. type *77 on your phone
  5. after the beep, record your holiday message
  6. in the ‘Step 3’ on that web page give name the recoding AnnTurkey (in this example)
  7. choose the Save option in the web interface
  8. choose Apply Configuration Changes as needed, that’s the little orange horizontal pop-up at the top of the page, then choose ‘Continue with reload’

Step 2 – Create Announcement

  1. click on the Announcement option in the left hand column
  2. in the description field type Turkey (in this example)
  3. in the Recording drop down box choose the name of the recording – AnnTurkey
  4. in the ‘Destination after playback’ select Time Condition and choose Daytime (in this example)
  5. click Submit Changes
  6. choose Apply Configuration Changes as needed, that’s the little orange horizontal pop-up at the top of the page, then choose Continue With Reload

Step 3 – Insert Before IVR

  1. click on the IVR option in the left hand column
  2. choose your main IVR listed on the right hand side of the page
  3. IMPORTANT – write down the Announcement currently there so you can reset it later
  4. in the Announcement option choose AnnTurkey
  5. set a Timeout of 2, this means after your announcement it will wait 2 seconds and then contiune with the next step
  6. in the TimeoutMessage choose your main Announcement (Step 3 above)

Step 4 – Remove the Announcement

  1. connect to the FreePBX web interface
  2. click on the IVR option in the left hand column
  3. choose your main IVR listed on the right hand side of the page
  4. in the Announcement option choose your main\normal announcement
  5. remove the Timeout setting (it was 2)
  6. in the TimeoutMessage choose ‘none’
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