3rd party voice mail that will integrate with Avaya 5

[rak342]

Hello,
We are looking for a replacement voice mail system for our School District. Currently we use a Computer Instruments EIVR and it integrates to the Avaya system over Analog ports, so it doesn't give us caller ID with the email notifications. It's been installed over 8 years and we're looking to upgrade.

Does anyone use any other 3rd party voice mail systems? Price will be a big factor.
I believe we have a S8500 with CM 5.1 or 5.2? And G650 cabinets.

Thank you

 

[Dariusz2k]

We've looked at AVST,Microsoft and Aura(Which is the Avaya Solution) the lowest cost solution was Avaya's Aura by far. Licenses are the biggest cost of the system overall but it's end of year so you could probably get discounts on all sorts of Avaya stuff.

 

[busster]

We have installed Innovation voicemail, which caters to Hotel/Motel, but also provides traditional voicemail. Works great.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

 

[lopes1211]

Duvoice is cheap and also supports Avaya. I do not if it has email integration but most new systems today do.

-CL

 

[dialtonebone]

Aura Messaging is the product that would go along with your system. However, you said 3rd party... AVST is pretty popular. I think the Exchange UM voicemail is awesome though.

 

[fataldata]

DuVoice supports email. We have a capital submission to replace our Intuity this year. DuVoice support is much less expensive than Aura Messaging. And while I as a tech would love to have a completely supported Avaya implementation management holds the pocket book.

 

[donb01]

AVST CX is the best choice in 3rd party voicemail when it comes to being able to integrate it to a variety of different vendor platforms. We have AVST now with our Siemens system and we intentionally chose it because we knew we were going to upgrade our systems to VOIP in a few years and we didn't want to be locked into one vendor's product. Avaya was among the equipment we considered for our upgrade, and there were no concerns about integrating it with the AVST. You buy the board(s) you need and license the integration you want and the number of special licenses you want. I don't know if it works the same for all installations, but voicemail licenses (on the CX-E Enterprise version) are unlimited on ours, and we only had to buy the licenses/seats for Unified Messaging, Speech Recognition, or Mobility products we might want. They have some really slick mobility apps on there that allow you to access your voicemail from the web or your mobile phone, change your out of office status and message via mobile, place calls from your mobile thru your PBX (if authorized) to keep your personal cell number private or avoid tolls, and a really slick Siri-like mobility interface called ADAM that does everything except make you breakfast (if you license all the various features). I have had it for 3 years now and really like working with it.

 

[rak342]

Hello,
Thanks for all the comments and recommendations.
Without losing our current features and adding Mobile Apps would be great.
It sounds like AVST, Aura and DuVoice are the front runners. I guess my biggest concern is seamless integration to the Avaya system and cost.

Our current features (a must have for the new system):
-Message lights on/off to the Avaya platform.
-Email notification with wav file.
-Internal and external messages.
-transferring calls between voice mail boxes and extensions.
-easy vacation/out of office message setup
-no less then 12 auto attendance(we network all of our buildings back to the main campus)
-no less then 500 voice mail boxes.

Thanks,
Randy
MTSD

 

[donb01]

I don't already work with a vendor that supports AVST I would suggest Black Box Network Services, as they are high level certified for the majority of the major PBX vendors and the AVST platform. I don't know where you're from, so I'll give you the number for my Milwaukee rep, and she can help you get to the right office if you want to get a price quote. Her name is Michelle Ball and the number is 262-798-2375.

As for all of your requirements, I am using all of that right now. Unified Messaging is your ideal solution for the message delivery to E-mail, but I know you can to E-mail notifications of new message arrival and attach a .WAV file to that message. The catch there is that you will receive a copy of the message and the original will still be in your mailbox to deal with. In true UM when you delete the E-mail with the message it will be removed from your mailbox as well. But the notify way is free and some of the UM ways have a fee per user. There are about 5 different ways to do message delivery in AVST.

For auto attendants, that is driven by how many ports you have configured in the system for your call volume. An auto attendant is basically just another form of a mailbox. You can select how many ports can be used for notifications, outdials, incoming calls, etc, so that is pretty flexible. I am running mine with 24 ports and about 700 user mailboxes and that is enough for me. My system has direct inward dial though, so most of my calls go direct to desk without first hitting voicemai, and voicemail only answers if the person is not available. The rest of the stuff I use for customer menus to direct them to different areas and departments' etc. I have not used all 24 ports at once yet in over 3 years.

Vacation stuff is pretty easier from your desk and even easier if you set up the mobile apps. I believe the mobile apps are all included in the purchase, but need to be run on a webserver such as IIS or Apache.

The system is also very configurable for redundancy and the ability to spread out the system servers over several sites if needed or wanted, and it has your choice of 5 different telephone user interfaces so you can pick the one where the button presses most closely match the ones you have now.

Hope that helps a bit. It can't hurt to call and ask for the literature and docs on the system or have them work up how much it's going to cost. I have quite a bit of licensing and features set up on mine and I think it only ran around $65K someplace. Your mileage may vary. you can also go to

http://www.avst.com

for product information as well.