The first step toward setting up an automated attendant or bulletin board is to understand the concepts.
An automated attendant is an interactive telephone answering system that answers incoming calls with a prerecorded announcement and routes them based on the caller's response to menus and prompts.
You set up an automated attendant so that callers hear a menu of options. Callers then press the button on their telephone keypad that corresponds to the menu option they want. The automated attendant then executes the selected option. Callers who do not have touchtone telephones are typically told that they can hold or call another number to speak with a live attendant.
You can design an automated attendant menu system, or menu tree, to contain subordinate layers of menus or bulletin boards. These submenus, or nested menus, play additional options that can include a choice leading to another nested menu.
The menu options that callers hear are actually personal greetings that you record for the automated attendant's extension. You can easily change the text of the message just as you would any personal greeting. You can also use the Multiple Personal Greetings feature to provide different menus and options for different types of calls.
A bulletin board is an electronic message system that callers can access to hear messages. Callers dial the bulletin board telephone number and the system answers and presents callers with a recorded message. The major difference between a bulletin board and an automated attendant is that a bulletin board does not have an option to route the call.