The UM service is your access to basic and advanced voicemail functionalities. With UM you can listen to your message and manipulate them (send, forward, copy), create advanced vocal menus at home, and set up your voice preferences.

You can access UM from the following page:
http://um.vif.com/ (We suggest you bookmark it)
The username and password can be obtained by contacting VIF Internet by telephone.

Once logged in, you are presented with this screen:

To listen to any voicemail received, you can click on the subject of the message (normally “Voice Message”). The following screen appears:
The message starts playing automatically (make sure your PC Speakers are on!). You can play it again once finished by clicking on the Play button again, or stop it at any time by clicking the Stop button.

• Please note that the “Reply” function cannot send a voicemail back to the original sender, and does not generally have any use except between users of our VoIP service. To contact the sender you will need to call them as usual.
• If you wish to forward the voice message to another email you can do so by clicking the Forward button on the voicemail.

UM is technically an email server and can be used to send an receive messages. The email address attributed to your box is your full phone number followed by @um.vif.com (e.g. 15143539988@um.vif.com) and offers only 10 megs of space which is shared by the emails as well as the voicemails, so we strongly suggest not using it in this method. You can instead use your VIF email, information about this service is available by calling us.

UM supports advanced settings and call treatment functionalities, which could cause issues if misused. This section presents a basic guide to these functionalities, and the information presented herein is the extent of VIF's technical support knowledge of these functions. If you wish to add information to this section, please email us at viftech@vif.com and we will add this information to this section.

To access the configuration, hover your mouse (move the cursor on top of) the rightmost of the four icons at the top-left corner of the UM screen. All sections are saved using the “Save and Close” link at the top-left corner of each sections.

• Personal Information: Used to change the name and email displayed when sending messages from UM. We suggest not using this.
• Message Highlighting: Used to highlight messages according to certain rules, such as “highlight messages in yellow if they come from XXX-XXXX number”. Click Add and follow on-screen instructions.
• Index Order: Used to show, hide and order the “columns” shown for the messages in the inbox. Default options should be correct for most users.
• Display Preferences: Change general options such as how many messages to show per page, amongst other options that are mostly email related. We suggest not changing those options though they will not interfere with receiving voicemails and viewing them.
• Folder Options: Default options should be correct for most users.
• UM Preferences, Auto Attendant, Dial Directory, Call Queues: See next section

UM preferences will give you access to the voicemail system's advanced functionality as well as the options to change and review all the voice prompts the system will offer to your caller when you are absent (or not, as you will see). The last three options from the list of preferences are all related to UM Preferences and more precisely to the Auto Attendant function, which will be covered later.

Please note that the first time you enter the UM Preferences screen you will be prompted to accept a few things. You might be requested to add UM to your Java Privacy options, you can click Yes on this screen (which does not always appear). You will then be presented with the following screen:

You will need to click on the link within that window and run the file presented to you (simply select “Run” from the Internet Explorer download window), and then close the window and login again to UM to continue (we are aware that this can be annoying, unfortunately it is necessary, and will happen only once). Now, on to the fun stuff.

From the UM preferences, there are 5 tabs you can access.

This tab will determine if you are using the regular voicemail functions, in which your greeting is played to your caller when you are absent, and he can leave a message to you which can be heard in various ways. Selecting Voicemail in this tab will select this mode, of which you can choose the other options in the other tabs of UM Preferences.

The Auto Attendant option is used for more advanced voicemail greetings with menus and dialpad options (also called “IVR”). This can be immensely useful to small businesses but can be fun to play with for home users. Selecting this option will render all other sections of UM Preferences useless, however it will not erase those options so feel free to have fun with these two choices. See the Auto Attendant section for more info on this mode.

This tab gives you 4 different options to select the greeting played to your caller when he reaches the voicemail:

• Extended Absence: A “secondary” greeting played if you are out of the house for a long period of time. You could, for example, record “Hi, this is John, I'm on vacation right now, but you can leave a message and I'll get it between two sips of Margaritas! Ole!”.
• Personal: Your regular personal voice message greeting, for example “Hi, you've reached Jane but I'm unavailable right now, so you know what to do after the beep!”.
• Name: Here you can record your name only, and the system will give the message for you: “You have reached <Your Name>. Please leave a message”.
• Standard: This is the default system message that says “The person you are trying to reach is not available. Please leave a message.”

To record your messages here, you will need to have a microphone properly setup for recording (see your computer-saavy friend for help on this one). You can start recording by clicking on the red dot (record) button, then stop on the same button with the black square (stop) button. After recording, or anytime you come back to this page, you can play the message with the green arrow (play) button.
Please note that your messages will only be recorded when you click on “Save” at the top-left corner of the screen!.

These are general options for the voicemail:

• Password: Voicemail access password, needed only from remote access or if you check the following option
• Always Ask…: Checking this option means you will be required to enter your password (from the previous option) anytime you access your voicemail, even from home! Useful only if there's someone in your house you don't trust, however.
• Prompt Levels: Selects which voice prompts are played when you call your voicemail. Extended prompts are longer (but not necessarily more useful) and Rapid prompts are short and sweet if you want to shave a few seconds from your message checking routine.
• Announce Date & Time: Will vocally announce the date and time of the voice message before playing the message. Note that you can manually check this information by hitting 5 on your dialpad anytime while listening to the message.
• Auto Play: When entering your voicemail, will automatically play the first message, if there are new unheard messages.

In case you didn't know, if someone wants to send you a fax, all you need to do is to let the voicemail system take the call and it will automatically convert the FAX into digital format and send it to you (through UM or by email)! This tab lets you select which format to send in: One single PDF or TIFF file, or a one-file-per-page scheme.

If you want an email copy of voicemails and faxes sent to you by email, here is where you do it. Enter your email in he box (only one email, sorry!) and select one of the following actions:

• None: Will do nothing, obviously.
• Forward: Will forward voicemails and faxes to your email and will not keep a copy on the server (meaning you will not have access to them from the UM website or from your phone!).
• Notify: Will send you a small notification informing you that you have received a new voicemail or fax (useful to send to a blackberry or other mobile device).
• Copy: Will send a copy of voicemails and faxes to your email and will keep a copy on the server.

In order to simplify this page, I have separated the Auto Attendant section into a different page, which is available here: PortaOne Auto Attendant.