ShoreTel Call Screening is now available in Version 9!   Earlier versions of ShoreTel had a “find me follow me” feature that worked well.   Someone could hit your voice mail greeting and be told to “Press One and the system will attempt to locate me”   You could have two locations and the ShoreTel would call the first location and if you did not answer, it would try the second location.   The system was smart enough to know that if you answered the call at the first location , but did not accept the call, the system would not bother to continue on to the second location.  (Some suggested that an improvement might be to call both locations at the same time).    If the person trying to find you was another member of your team, the ShoreTel would alert you with a friendly sounding “ I have a call from Gandalf”, using the recorded name of the internal team members voice mail.    Unfortunately, if the caller was from outside the system, you would get a very un friendly “I have a call from 212-536-7865”   and that was always a disappointment.

 ShoreTel has remedied  this in its latest release of Version 9.    The system can now prompt the caller with “the party you are calling has requested your name….(record record)”.   Then when the system call you, you will hear a more friendly “ I have a call from (record playback)”.      This is a much more useful function for those who are away from the desk a great deal of the time.  In fact, you can speed the process by having the call go directly into the find me follow me mode before the caller hears your greeting.       You can do this by “Enable record callers name for Find Me”  plus also selecting the “enable find me for incoming calls before playing greeting”.   Set you call handling mode to “out of office” and check find me follow me.   An incoming call to your desk will ring your first “find me location” after saying to the caller “ the person you are calling has requested your name”.    When you receive the call you can hear the name of the person you calling and then accept or reject the call as desired.  

 If you use this trick, you need to make sure the greeting in your mailbox for this call handling mode acknowledges that fact that the “find me option” has already been tried automatically.  It would not make sense to leave the caller a greeting that says “if you need to speak to me press one and the system will attempt to locate me”!