New deployments often require configuring a direct transfer to voicemail. Not too long ago @ifoam wrote this great piece on the steps involved in setting up this up: Transfer to Voicemail, which I recently referred to when I found that my configuration wasn’t working.

The article, however, confirmed my suspicions that I hadn’t missed any steps in the system configuration process, but when calls were transferred straight to the voicemail server, the user extensions weren’t coming along for the ride.

Fast forward several research minutes later to this obscurity, in particular the third entry by Randall White: https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2053902

Upon first reading, I found the fix too absurd to be likely, which I’m sure why Mr. White added the “no, I’m not joking” part.  The solution being proposed was the removal of the word “voicemail” from the alerting name of the CTI route point.

For those of us in voice, we’re rather familiar with what the alerting name controls, and no, it doesn’t usually have anything to do with this.  Alerting name shows up on phone displays and it’s generally one of those put-whatever-you-want-here-the-system-doesn’t-care fields. Except in this case it did. It cared a lot.

So instead of calling my CTI route point Direct To Voicemail – I changed it to Direct To VM.   Yep, that was it. I removed the offending vocabulary, quit infringing on the voicemail server’s sensitivities, and all was set right with the world.

And this is why voice engineers drink.

 

Publish Date: 2011/11/28