Any individual who has been assigned a voicemail file on the system can send and receive voice messages. The system then responds with an oral menu of' activities. By keying a selection into the telephone, the user can either send messages to other parties on the system or listen to messages that have been stored. To send a message to another party, the user dictates the message into the telephone and sends it using the extension of the addressee. Occasionally, if a user wants to review a message for content, he or she may, using a touch-tone telephone, instruct the system to replay the message that was dictated.
Voicemail can result in eliminating some of the overhead associated with writing traditional memos.
Instead of a user dictating or handwriting a memo and having it transcribed by a secretary, he or she can now speak directly into a telephone and review the messages until satisfied. No longer does the memo sit in a mailroom waiting for delivery, and a secretary does not have to deliver it personally. If an addressee wants to save a memo for future reference, it can be transferred to a voicemail file cabinet, another section of the computer's magnetic disk. This file operates like a traditional file cabinet, providing storage for recordings of messages sent and received. They are accompanied by a header message that identifies the sender and the time and date of the message.