The district uses Cisco Unity voicemail. Alongside the traditional mailbox you reach from your phone, the system includes Unified Messaging, which delivers a copy of each voicemail to your district email inbox as a .wav file attachment. Understanding how the two halves interact prevents most of the confusion people run into.
How your mailbox works
- Every district phone number has a voice mailbox. It needs to be enrolled once — see Setting Up and Using Your Voicemail.
- You reach it by pressing the Messages button on your desk phone, from the voicemail icon in Jabber, or by calling in from any phone.
- You can record up to six different personal greetings for different circumstances. See Managing Your Voicemail Greetings.
- You can create private distribution lists to send one message to a whole group at once.
Unified Messaging: voicemail in your email
If your phone number is assigned to you personally — that is, tied to your CWID — each new voicemail also arrives as an email with the audio attached as a .wav file. You can play it from your inbox on any device.
Who does and doesn't get it
| Situation | Unified Messaging? |
|---|---|
| Phone number assigned to you | Yes — a phone number assigned to you personally (tied to your CWID) will be set up for Unified Messaging |
| Department main line or shared line | No — a department number that is not also an individual employee's number cannot be set up for Unified Messaging |
| Employee in an interim position | No — voicemail is retrieved by telephone only |
| TEA / temporary employee | Generally no — temporary employees are not assigned personal phone numbers |
| Part-time faculty | Depends — whether the office phone is assigned to you personally is a college decision. Contact your Dean. |
A quick way to tell: if your name does not appear on the phone display and voicemails never show up in your FHDA email, the number is not associated with your CWID.
The part that trips everyone up
The email copy and the phone mailbox are linked, and actions in one affect the other.
Opening the email marks the voicemail as heard
As soon as you open or read the email — not when you listen to the attachment — the email system tells the voicemail system to change the message from New to Saved. The email system doesn't track whether you actually played the audio.
Which is why the red light goes out
The red message-waiting light on your handset is lit only while you have unread voicemail. Opening the email turns it off. If your smart phone is set up for FHDA email, it may report the message as read the moment it downloads new mail — which turns off your desk phone light before you've even looked at it.
Deleting the email does not delete the voicemail
Deleting the email leaves the message on the voicemail system. The reverse is not true: deleting the message from the voicemail system also deletes the email.
Saving a voicemail permanently
To keep a voicemail indefinitely, move the email with the .wav attachment to a new folder at the same level as your Inbox — not a subfolder of the Inbox. Once moved, the voicemail is removed from your mailbox, but you keep the email until you delete it yourself.
This matters: if you leave the email in a subfolder of your Inbox and later delete the message from your phone, the email disappears too.
Filing voicemail emails automatically
You can create an Outlook/OWA inbox rule to move voicemail emails into a folder automatically. Because the From field may show the caller ID rather than a consistent sender, filter on the Subject line using the words "Message from". Be aware this may also catch some non-voicemail emails.
Where to go next
- Setting Up and Using Your Voicemail — first-time enrollment, the menu map, checking messages from off campus, distribution lists
- Managing Your Voicemail Greetings — the six greeting types and how they override each other
- Troubleshooting Voicemail — forgotten PIN, missing messages, red light problems