SARK V4.0.0 directvmail
Background
Sometimes we want to send a call directly to voicemail or even to directly dial a colleague's voicemail to leave then a message without waiting for the phone to ring before eventually dropping to the voicemail service. In SARK we can do this by prefixing the extension number with an asterisk (*). So we can make a dial like this
*356
This feature does catch users out from time to time because it behaves slightly differently to a regular voicemail call. A regular voicemail call will play the general voicemail instructions if you have "Voicemail Instructions" set to "YES" in Globals. A direct voicemail call will never play the voicemail instructions irrespective of the setting in globals, but it WILL play any unavailable message which the user may have recorded. This makes sense when you consider how it will normally be used.
- case 1 - direct dial an extension to leave a voicemail. Internal users are familiar with voicemail and so usually don't want to hear the instructions.
- case 2 - a call group outcomes to a voicemail using (*+ext). Most customers want to deliver a bespoke message when this happens (rather than; "The person at extension....") so they would normally record an appropriate unavailable message for the receiving extension.
Case 2 tends to occasionally cause confusion because some users do indeed just want the Voicemail instructions to be played and don't record an unavailable message so the caller simply hears ringing than a beep and nothing else.
The correct way to use it is to ensure you have recorded an unavailable message for the receiving extension.
