I have a Lync Response Group configured for our primary office DID. There are 5 people that are a member of this group. When these 5 people are not available the call goes to voicemail even though there are people in the office. To get around this I'd like to add some common area phone to the response group. Is this possible and if so how is it done??

Hi Jacob,

Having a CAP directly added to a response group is not supported.

I see two possibilities to achieve your scenario:

- Having a special account, enterprise voice enabled, logged into a phone. This account would be added to the response group as ultimate fallback.

- Having other folks in the office as fallback agent group in case nobody from the 5 assigned agents is available at that time. This would be my preferred option.

Cheers,
Frédéric

Hi Jacob,

Having a CAP directly added to a response group is not supported.

I see two possibilities to achieve your scenario:

- Having a special account, enterprise voice enabled, logged into a phone. This account would be added to the response group as ultimate fallback.

- Having other folks in the office as fallback agent group in case nobody from the 5 assigned agents is available at that time. This would be my preferred option.

Cheers,
Frédéric

• Proposed as answer by jyoungjr Friday, March 04, 2011 3:02 PM

Can I ask why this is not supported?? This is actually something I would think many people would like to do.

Having the rest of the office in a fallback group won't work. Staff may be out on site or at home. They are not necessarily always in the office.

Surely these is a better solution??

CAP are a new feature of Lync Server 2010 and adding native support for them in Response Group had to be evaluated against other features (such as agent anonymity, for example). Given our dev resource constraints, we were not able to include it in Lync Server 2010 but this is definitely considered for the next version, based on the feedback we're receiving.

Cheers,
Frédéric

Definitely needed. I want to put my fist through the monitor right now as i was trying to figure a way to do this, even tried from powershell adding the CAP sip address to the Agent group.

Hope it comes in a service pack and don't have to wait for lync 2014 or whatever.

Actually i only needed this feature because interactive response groups will only send the call to a queue and not a single number or address. Instead i have to send the call to a queue which has an agent group with a single person, or in the case of the CAP i can't even do that.

 

 

p.s. i have no need for agent anonymity so far, in fact it broke transfers back to the agent if the person the call was transfered to didn't answer, it would just dump the call.

Unless I'm not understanding the problem, there is a way to do this and Frederic already mentioned it.

Create an enterprise enabled user just for the common area phone, put those details in the phone, add the user to the response group.

When I had the same issue, I used Snom 300 phones like this with OCS R2 response groups.

 

OR - does this help??? http://blogs.technet.com/b/dougl/archive/2009/08/12/outbound-pstn-calling-from-response-groups.aspx

I 'believe' this also works for SIP addresses, but I've not tested on Lync - for sending to a single number or address as you mentioned.

Regards

Paul Adams

I made a RG that had no open hours and forwarded to a number to get around it.

it was only temp until I built a custom AA in exchange.

I just came across the need to do this and could not find any answers in many searches so I played around to develop my own answer.

1) Create your Common area phones as normal.   Assign your LineURI and give it a pin and sign into phone.

2) Open AD Users & Computers (make sure you're in Advanced View).  Find the object and click on Attribute Editor.  You are looking for the SIP address of the contact object.  The attribute you are looking for is called "msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress".   The SIP address will be a long randomly generated, based on your default sip domain.   For example: "sip:36c3ba3e-79cd-4569-88c5-44fc6faa3687@domain.com"   Copy this sip address.

3) Create a dummy user account - we named ours "Common Area Phone_RG"  (whatever the name of the common area phone was _RG).  We left this account disabled as it will never be used but is required to stay. Lync enable this with Enterprise Voice.

4) Using AD Users & Computers - go to the newly created (and lync enabled user) and paste the sip address, overwriting the current msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress value.

5) Add the disabled dummy account to your response group.

In reality Lync just rings the sip address, and since we just duplicated both objects w/ the same SIP address - it worked fine.

(Note - I literally just did this today a few hours before writing.   It all seemingly works fine and common area phone is in response group as normal users always have behaved.  I have no idea any long-term ill effects of doing this.)

-Sam

I just came across the need to do this and could not find any answers in many searches so I played around to develop my own answer.

1) Create your Common area phones as normal.   Assign your LineURI and give it a pin and sign into phone.

2) Open AD Users & Computers (make sure you're in Advanced View).  Find the object and click on Attribute Editor.  You are looking for the SIP address of the contact object.  The attribute you are looking for is called "msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress".   The SIP address will be a long randomly generated, based on your default sip domain.   For example: "sip:36c3ba3e-79cd-4569-88c5-44fc6faa3687@domain.com"   Copy this sip address.

3) Create a dummy user account - we named ours "Common Area Phone_RG"  (whatever the name of the common area phone was _RG).  We left this account disabled as it will never be used but is required to stay. Lync enable this with Enterprise Voice.

4) Using AD Users & Computers - go to the newly created (and lync enabled user) and paste the sip address, overwriting the current msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress value.

5) Add the disabled dummy account to your response group.

In reality Lync just rings the sip address, and since we just duplicated both objects w/ the same SIP address - it worked fine.

(Note - I literally just did this today a few hours before writing.   It all seemingly works fine and common area phone is in response group as normal users always have behaved.  I have no idea any long-term ill effects of doing this.)

-Sam

(Editing to add:)  Note - As others have suggested making a user dedicated to the phone is a "solution" but does not allow for Hot Desking.   My solution required a hot-desking - common area phone to be in a response group.   When a user logs onto hot desk - the phone will stop ringing until they log off and the phone goes back to the common area phone profile.

I just came across the need to do this and could not find any answers in many searches so I played around to develop my own answer.

1) Create your Common area phones as normal.   Assign your LineURI and give it a pin and sign into phone.

2) Open AD Users & Computers (make sure you're in Advanced View).  Find the object and click on Attribute Editor.  You are looking for the SIP address of the contact object.  The attribute you are looking for is called "msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress".   The SIP address will be a long randomly generated, based on your default sip domain.   For example: "sip:36c3ba3e-79cd-4569-88c5-44fc6faa3687@domain.com"   Copy this sip address.

3) Create a dummy user account - we named ours "Common Area Phone_RG"  (whatever the name of the common area phone was _RG).  We left this account disabled as it will never be used but is required to stay. Lync enable this with Enterprise Voice.

4) Using AD Users & Computers - go to the newly created (and lync enabled user) and paste the sip address, overwriting the current msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress value.

5) Add the disabled dummy account to your response group.

In reality Lync just rings the sip address, and since we just duplicated both objects w/ the same SIP address - it worked fine.

(Note - I literally just did this today a few hours before writing.   It all seemingly works fine and common area phone is in response group as normal users always have behaved.  I have no idea any long-term ill effects of doing this.)

-Sam

(Editing to add:)  Note - As others have suggested making a user dedicated to the phone is a "solution" but does not allow for Hot Desking.   My solution required a hot-desking - common area phone to be in a response group.   When a user logs onto hot desk - the phone will stop ringing until they log off and the phone goes back to the common area phone profile.

• Edited by Sam Bentrup Saturday, August 17, 2013 1:11 PM
• Proposed as answer by Jeffy-g Friday, January 23, 2015 9:49 PM

Regarding the above solution, it will only work when done in "Parallel" mode. Otherwise once the CAP falls to an "away" status and will be bypassed from the other Routing Methods.

• Edited by Jeffy-g Thursday, January 29, 2015 2:06 PM