We are trying to move from Cisco Unity to Exchange 2010 SP1 Unified messaging.
Our goal is to keep everything as similar as possible. With unity our Auto Attendant greeting is something like this:
"Thank You for calling. If you know your parties extension you may dial it at any time. For Support press 1, for Sales press 2."
In the exchange auto attendant we can't figure out how to make the "dial the extension at any time" part. We have "Allow Caller to transfer to users" enabled and NameLookupEnabled set to false but when there are key mappings enabled on the dial plan it requires you to hit # (pound) before dialing an extension.
Is there any way to have an Exchange Auto Attendant allow the caller to enter an extension without having to hit the pound key with key mappings enabled?
Annoying no, we have the same issue with our setup. It has taken almost a year before clients/customers/vendors to stop dialing directly. Since all of our extensions start with 4 or 5 (3 digits on our Toshiba CIX670), I just left those out of the main menu so she complains at the caller and forces them to comply.
We have an additional annoying issue where we can't dial voicemail directly. Press * for voicemail never worked. We ended up creating a bogus extension on our CIX that simply transfered the call back to the autoattendant and then on the SIP gateway dumped all the call info if calls came from that extension. It works, but its a stupid work around for a feature that is in there, but doesn't work.