I’m setting up a new Debian 12 system with FreePBX 17 and about 40 Yealink SIP phones. Most users won’t have voicemail, but I have a reception team of 4 users, each with their own extension and Yealink phone.
I don’t want individual voicemails for these 4 users. Instead, I plan to create a ring group with these 4 extensions. If a call to the ring group isn’t answered, I want the call to go to a shared voicemail box.
Here’s what I need help with:
When a voicemail is left for the ring group, I want the voicemail light (MWI) to turn on for all 4 reception phones.
When they press the envelope button, it should go to the shared voicemail box (not their personal one), and ask for a PIN.
Right now, Yealink phones let me set a voicemail number for the envelope button, but won’t FreePBX just send them to their personal voicemail by default?
HI. I have an alternative for you.
This is what we do for scenarios like that.
Set up 1 extension to get all of the voice mails.
Set up an email address to receive the voice mails.
Have that 1 extension email all of the voice mails to the email address, along with the attached voice mail message, then delete it from FreePBX.
Give all 4 people access to that email box.
This also allows you to forward any voice mails that need to be addressed by someone else, to that person, along with the attached voice mail so they can hear it. you can create sub folders for “completed”, archive, etc, and since it is email even attach notes to the email so staff can document what was done about the voice mail.
We stopped using the phone system “voice mail” where people have to pick up the phone and press a bunch of buttons, years ago. Now it all goes to email and it gives us much better control over it.
This is pretty easy to setup and I have something similar. Let’s say you have the 4 reception phones in a ring group or queue. For the example, well say the extension numbers are as follows:
Reception 1 - 301
Reception 2 - 302
Reception 3 - 303
Reception 4 - 304
Ring Group or Queue - 500
The easiest thing to do is to designate one of the 4 reception extensions to “house” the reception mailbox. So let’s say that is going to be Ext 301.
We setup a Ring Group or Queue (500) that contains the 4 reception extensions as members. We then set the “Destination if no answer” (if a ring group) or the “Fail over destination” (if a queue) to be the voicemail of the reception extension that will house the reception mailbox, in this case voicemail 301 and you can choose which greeting in that mailbox you want to play, usually the unavailable message.
Now that we have our ring group setup we need to set other three reception phones to look at mailbox 301 for their message waiting indicator.
In the extension module for extensions 302, 303, and 304, we need to go to the Advanced tab and set the Mailbox field to “301@device” (without the quotes). This will set the phones themselves to say 301 is their mailbox.
Next you’ll need to login to the web UI (or however you are provisioning your phones) for ext 302, 303, and 304 and set the voicemail number for the envelope button to be *98301. This will set those phones to subscribe to the message waiting indicator for 301 and when you press the envelope let on the phones you’ll be prompted for the password for mailbox 301.
Like Daniel said but instead of using one of the mailbox of a reception I would add a virtual extension with an enabled voicemail. But this is just a personal opinion.
@joni1802 the only reason I don’t do a virtual mailbox is because I thought at one time virtual mailboxes wouldn’t light a MWI when using PJSIP. But that may have since been fixed and it’s been a long time since I’ve tested it.