Call sharing and group call pickup
The call sharing and group call pickup features of Microsoft Teams let users share their incoming calls with colleagues so that the colleagues can answer calls that occur while the user is unavailable.
Group call pickup is less disruptive to recipients than other forms of call sharing because users can configure how they want to be notified of an incoming shared call, and they can decide whether to answer it. The order in which members of the call group are notified about the incoming call can be specified as simultaneous or in order (with 5 or less members).
Important
Users, the call group owner, and members of the call group must be in Teams Only deployment mode. For more details on Teams deployment modes, see Understand Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business coexistence and interoperability.
License required
Users must be assigned a Microsoft Teams Phone license to set up and use call sharing and group call pickup. For additional details on the licensing model, see Here's what you get with Teams Phone.
Limitations
A user can only be the owner of one call group. Each configured call group can have a maximum of 25 users or 32,768 characters. A user can be a member of maximum 25 call groups.
Note that mobile devices will only get notified if they're set for banner and ringtone.
Enable the use of group call pickup
You enable call groups by configuring the TeamsCallingPolicy AllowCallGroups setting for a user. You can use Teams admin center or PowerShell. When enabled, the user can configure their call groups in the Teams client.
Important
When you turn off call groups for users, you must clean up the call group relationships for users in the Teams admin center to avoid incorrect call routing.
Use Teams admin center
You can use the Teams admin center to configure group call pickup for your users.
To configure immediate call forward settings:
In the Teams admin center, go to Users > Manage users and select a user.
On the user details page, go to the Voice tab.
Under Call answering rules, you can select either:
- Ring user's devices and select Group call pickup from the Also allow dropdown
- Be immediately forwarded and select Group call pickup from the Call forward type dropdown
Select Manage call group and select Add people to add the appropriate users to the call group.
For each user in the call group, select the type of notification that the user will see when they get an incoming call. Ring is the default notification type.
From the dropdown, select the appropriate call group order.
Select Save.
Use PowerShell
To configure call groups for users, use the following Teams PowerShell Module cmdlets:
PowerShell examples
The following example creates a call group for user1@contoso.com with the members user2@contoso.com and user3@contoso.com, and sets immediate call forwarding to the call group for user1@contoso.com:
$cgm = @("sip:user2@contoso.com","sip:user3@contoso.com")
Set-CsUserCallingSettings -Identity user1@contoso.com -CallGroupOrder InOrder -CallGroupTargets $cgm
Set-CsUserCallingSettings -Identity user1@contoso.com -IsForwardingEnabled $true -ForwardingType Immediate -ForwardingTargetType Group
The next example shows how to update the call group of user1@contoso.com to add user5@contoso.com, and remove user6@contoso.com:
$ucs = Get-CsUserCallingSettings -Identity user1@contoso.com
$cgt = {$ucs.CallGroupTargets}.Invoke()
$cgt.Add("sip:user5@contoso.com")
$cgt.Remove("sip:user6@contoso.com")
Set-CsUserCallingSettings -Identity user1@contoso.com -CallGroupOrder $ucs.CallGroupOrder -CallGroupTargets $cgt