If users in your organization work in teams and want to allow other members of their team to pick up their incoming calls, they can use the Team Call feature in Office Communicator 2007 R2. The Team Call feature emulates the group pickup feature in traditional telephone systems. In the Call Forwarding Settings, an Office Communicator 2007 R2 user can set up a group of contacts who can answer his or her incoming calls. The user can configure this feature to ring the entire group simultaneously, or the user can set a delay so that the calls ring him or her first and then the group after a specified number of seconds.

If your organization needs to be able to route and queue incoming calls to groups of designated agents, you can use the Response Group Service in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to create and configure one or more small Response Groups. A Response Group, also known as a workflow, can be as simple as a hunt group, or it can also be configured to support more complex scenarios where an interactive voice response (IVR) solution is used to gather input from the caller to determine how a call should be handled. The Response Group Service is designed for deployments in departmental or workgroup environments.

The Response Group Service includes the standard functionality that you would expect in a PBX hunt group, including:

• Call routing and queuing.
  
  
• Multiple routing methods (serial, parallel, round robin, and longest idle).
  
  
• Agent sign-in and sign-out.
  
  
• Music on hold.
  
  

Response Group Service also provides the following features:

• Interactive voice response.This includes support for text-to-speech, .wav files, speech recognition, and dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF).
  
  
• Presence-based routing.Call routing takes agent presence status into account. Calls are routed to agents who are signed in and available.
  
  
• Configuration tools.Response Groups are deployed using a browser-based tool. Predefined templates are provided to make it easy for you to create new Response Groups.
  
  
• Simplified management.Agents, agent groups, and queues are managed using the familiar Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0 snap-in. Administrators can manage Response Groups directly and can delegate hunt group management duties to end users.
  
  

For an overview of the Response Group Service feature, see New Response Group Servicein New Server Features in the Getting Started documentation.

For an overview of the Response Group Service requirements and deployment sequence, see Response Group Service Support.