Example 6: Bulletin boards and daily announcements

For situations in which you need to make daily or frequent announcements to all the callers or subscribers who reach the system, it is more efficient to set it up so that the announcements are created and recorded within a special mailbox, rather than embedding the prompt into the caller application.

For these “bulletin board” or daily announcement types of mailboxes, you can create a special single-node caller application that will play the announcement and then automatically transfer the caller or subscriber to the main menu, for instance.

Considerations

When used in this way, the mailbox that the caller application accesses must be enabled for announcements (see Subscriber Options). You must also remember to create and enable this mailbox before creating the caller application.

Then, instead of using an Application prompt for the caller application prompt, you assign an Announcement prompt to the base caller application node.

You will also need to create and deploy the Main Menu caller application with an association ID of 4000 before building this caller application.

After creating and deploying this caller application, you must remember to create an association with an ID number of 80071 for this application.

The caller application design

The following call flow is an example of how you can set up an announcement-enabled mailbox to be used as a daily announcement or bulletin board mailbox. When callers access this caller application by dialing xx8-0071, they hear the announcement recorded in the announcement-enabled mailbox and then are immediately transferred to the Main Menu caller application, which has an association ID of 4000.

Building the application

The following table presents a step-by-step method for building the caller application. It assumes that you have already started the Caller Applications Editor. The Action(s) column gives a description of the step in the process, and the Location of procedure(s) column provides a link to the detailed procedure in the documentation that tells how to perform the step.


Step	Action(s)	Location of procedure(s)
1	Create the caller application base node. Name it Bulletin board. Provide a brief description and select the language.	Adding the base caller application node
2	Modify the caller application base node properties: Select Goto as the action type. Select Caller application and, from the drop-down menu select the Main Menu caller application, 4000. Select Play entry prompt and then select Announcement. In the drop-down list, select <default>. Note: You cannot record Announcement prompts. You can only view a list of the available Announcements, if any. Verify that the application is set to use the Default operator, <Parent node> as the Default cancel setting, and the * key as the Default cancel key.	Configuring the caller application properties Displaying a list of announcements
3	Save the application, if you have not already done so.	Saving a caller application