Exchange UM Auto Attendant Dial Extension Feature

A feature of Exchange Unified Messaging is an option to press the # key while listening to an Auto Attendant; this gives the caller the ability to search for a user by name or extension. We found this feature a little challenging for users to grasp because they have come accustomed to dialing the extension directly from the actual menu without the need to press additional buttons. This was a feature of our previous Cisco Unity voicemail system. Unfortunately (as far as I know) is not possible with Exchange UM.

The problem we encountered was that users where complaining that after hitting the # key while listening to the new Exchange AA they were unable to dial an extension directly. They were being prompted to spell the name of the person they were calling. This is by design in Exchange when creating a new Auto Attendant. It’s because newly created Auto Attendants are by default enabled for "Named Lookup" allowing the caller to type the name of a user in the organization.

To bypass the “namelookup” feature and go directly to typing in the extension of a user, callers would have to press the # key an additional time.

To get around this feature and give the users the option to hit the # key only once to get to the extension prompt you have to disable an attribute on the Auto Attendant called "NameLookEnabled", which by default is set to “True”.

To view this particular attribute you can use the following command.

Get-UMAutoAttendant –id “Replace with AA Name” | FL name,namelookupenabled





To disabled this feature of the Auto Attendant you can run this command

set-UMAutoAttendant -id “Replace with AA Name” -NameLookupEnabled $false

Then check to ensure your changes took by typing in the previous command

Get-UMAutoAttendant –id “Replace with AA Name” | FL name,namelookupenabled





To test your changes simply dial the Auto Attendants extension and while listening to the greeting press the # key, you should now be prompted to enter the extension of the person you would like to reach instead of spelling their name.

I hope this post is helpful to someone else. Thanks for reading!!!!