SUBJECT:

Status of Voicemail System Problems

Many of you experienced problems during the last few weeks since the new campus voicemail system was implemented. This notice is intended to provide you with a status report on these issues and to apologize for any inconvenience that you may have experienced.

As of this week, we believe that most of the critical problems with this system have been resolved. There are, however, several issues that we are still working on with Unisys (the system vendor). The list of resolved and pending issues includes:

(1) Callers occasionally reach an improper recording (e.g., "enter your password" or "this is an invalid mailbox") instead of reaching the personal greeting of the person they called. We believe that this problem has been resolved last weekend after applying a software patch provided by the vendor.

(2) The first word of some recordings is occasionally truncated. The vendor is still troubleshooting this problem and we hope to have this resolved soon.

(3) The "Alternate Message" feature is not available. This option was not available in the new system and we asked the vendor to add it. This feature is being developed and we hope that it will be available to you by late August.

(4) The ability to recover and listen to deleted messages was not available. This was corrected and you should now be able to listen to and recover deleted messages until the end of the day on which the messages were deleted.

(5) The new system plays a computer-generated recording in situations where the user did not record her/his name. We asked the vendor to fix this problem and hope to have it completed within the next couple of weeks.

(6) Some of our customers asked if the standard message after the "personal greeting" and before the beep could be shortened or eliminated. We asked the vendor to make this change and hope to have it completed within the next couple of weeks.

We sincerely apologize for these problems and we ask for your patience and for support as we fine-tune the new system. For detailed information on how to use the voicemail system, including a quick reference guide, please see: http://blink.ucsd.edu/go/voicemail

If you have any questions or encounter any new problems, please contact the ACT Help Desk at acthelp@ucsd.edu or at (858) 534-1853.

Elazar C. Harel Assistant Vice Chancellor- Administrative Computing and Telecommunications