The Conferencing Attendant is an auto-attendant service (that is, a bot) that authenticates and joins dial-in participants to audio conferences. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Conferencing Attendant supports 14 different languages. The Conferencing Attendant prompts the caller for conference IDs and passcode (that is, if the caller is calling in as an anonymous participant) or extension number and personal identification number (PIN) (that is, if the caller is joining as a Enterprise User), plays on-hold music when enterprise users have not yet joined the meeting, requests authentication from a front-end service, and joins authenticated callers to the Focus and A/V Conferencing Server for the requested conference ID.

The Conferencing Attendant Service on each Front End Server listens on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 5072 for incoming calls. These requests normally come from a Mediation Server and are proxied by the Mediation Server’s next hop pool.

The Conference Announcement Service is another trusted bot that participates in all dial-in enabled audio conferences. It monitors the conference roster and plays entry and exit tones to all dial-in attendees when other dial-in attendees join or leave, and also tells attendees when their microphone has been muted or unmuted in the language that they chose when they connected to the Conferencing Attendant. No configuration is required for this service.

The Conference Announcement Service on each Front End Server listens on TCP port 5073 for requests from a Focus that is running on one of the Front End Servers in the pool.

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Response Group Service enables administrators to create and configure one or more response groups for the purpose of routing and queuing incoming phone calls to one or more designated agents. These response groups can be deployed in departmental or workgroup environments and in entirely new telephony installations. Typical usage scenarios include an internal helpdesk, a customer service desk, or a general external call handler. Response Group Service can increase response group usage and reduce the associated overhead by pushing the tasks of response group maintenance down to the users who directly benefit from them.

The Response Group Service functionality is enabled by the Response Group Service application, which is a UCAS application that implements standard response group call-routing algorithms (that is, including serial, longest-idle, parallel, and round robin), interactive voice response (IVR), call queuing, on-hold music, presence-based routing, and so on.

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Outside Voice Control feature enables users to use their enterprise telephone number for inbound and outbound calls on their personal mobile phone.

To use this feature, the user must have Office Communicator Mobile (2007 R2 release) installed on a Windows Mobile phone and must be able to use data packet communication between the mobile phone and the mobile phone provider (for example, General Packet Radio Source (GPRS)) that allows SIP messages to be transmitted. The user must also be enabled for Enterprise Voice.

For inbound calls, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 sends a SIP Invite to all registered SIP endpoints of the user including the user’s Communicator Mobile (2007 R2 release) client running on the phone, over the data channel. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 subsequently initiates an outbound PSTN/mobile network call through Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Mediation Server to the user’s mobile phone number.

For an outbound call from a mobile phone, the user has the option to enter the phone number to be dialed into Communicator Mobile (2007 R2 release) or to initiate a call to a SIP contact using Communicator Mobile (2007 R2 release). The user receives an incoming mobile phone call from Office Communications Server using the mobile phone provider’s cellular network. After the user accepts the call from Office Communications Server, Office Communications Server sets up a second call leg to the designated called party and then join the two connections. The called party receives a call from the user’s company using the user’s office phone number despite the fact that the user is actually on a mobile phone.

The Outside Voice Control application on each Front End Server listens on TCP port 5074.