Greetings! One of my branch offices moved over to our Lync 2013 environment from a full Nortel PBX and they have a lot of requirements that we don't usually get. The latest:

1) They need a standalone voice mail box (we have plenty of spare DID's we can use for this) where they can record a greeting for employees to hear the status of the office in inclement weather.

2) They need another standalone voice mail box where people who are calling in sick can leave messages.

I had thought for this we might use a fictitious user account, which would mean we have to create an AD account with an Exchange mailbox and then delegate access to the responsible users. Concerns about how they would update the voice mail greeting for the inclement weather mailbox. Googling around resulted in some references to "department phones" but I couldn't find enough details to tell how you would set one up and if it had voice mail capabilities.

We are on Exchange 2013, Lync 2013, latest CU's and service packs.

Any suggestions for these scenarios would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

I had posted this question in the Lync forum under Voice, but thought this might be a more appropriate forum after looking at a couple similar questi

Hi Mike,

Just use your dial in voice mail access number to access the DID extensions of the inclement and sick mailboxes.  Give mailbox delegates full access and auto map the new (voice)mailbox to the delegates outlook.  Then enable these mailboxes for unified messaging, either create pin, or send email with temp pin.  Last, dial your VM access number, hit star to select new extention, and enter above pin.  From there you can check messages or change the message.  You can also assign this mailbox to anybody that needs to monitor it (from email) but not change greeting.

Hope this helps

-Brandon