Voicemail in Plain English - 3 of 7

How to Specify a Voice Processing System: The size or power of a Voice Processing System is stated in terms of ports. An entry-level system will usually be 2 port and can handle 2 callers/users simultaneously. These callers/users can be either people leaving messages, staff listening to messages or updateing their greeting message or inbound callers being stacked within the Auto Attendant facility. A 3rd caller to a 2 port system will either get the engaged tone or be queued in turn, depending on how the phone system is set up. Voice Processing can be bought in larger sizes where these usually increase in increments of 4 (ie. 2 port, 4 port, 8 port, 12 port, 16 port, 20 port, etc).

It is hard to predict how many ports you should specify for your organisation's Voice Processing System, as there are varying degrees of use. If you front-end all of your organisations inbound calls with Auto Attendant then you will utilise more ports than if the Auto Attendant is only set to handle overflow calls not answered by humans within a given time-frame.

Sites with less than 20 extensions generally choose a 2 or 4 port system. Sites between 20 and 50 extensions may use a 4 or 8 port system & so on. However the type of business the company is involved in may have a huge impact on these estimates.

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