We recently migrated from Skype for Business on-prem to Teams Phone System. I’m looking for either a product or native configuration to support an “on-call” type feature. Here is a description of what we had in our on-prem system:
“Pastor on Call”
We have a weekly rotation of staff pastors who are “on-call” for off-hours calls from our attendees. Our Life Help team owns this and is able to set who the on-call person is using a web page powered by this software: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Mobile-On-Duty-Free-7c42b3ff
All the software does is configure the forward destination for a SfB user. Said software doesn’t work with Teams. I’m able to achieve the functionality manually by logging in as a Teams user and setting it to forward. I can set that Teams user as an Auto Attendant option or as a call timeout destination for a Call Queue. However, this is not a good experience for our Life Help team. I don’t want them to have to completely sign out of Teams to sign in to this account and then go back, or to need to use an alternate browser or a private browsing mode to Teams on web.
I’ve thought about setting the pastor’s Teams user as the Auto Attendant and Call Queue destination rather than forwarding to their cell phone. However, I need to delegate this configuration to a team of people who really should not be configuring either of those things. Bonus points for a solution that can do this automatically based off of a calendar.
Great. This is an entirely unhelpful answer. Where is this option? How did you get there? What product are you referring to? Did you literally just Google my question and then copy-paste some random instructions?
Hi Ben,
When callers call our main number after hours they hear the after hours auto attendant greeting and are given an option to press “9” if it is an emergency and they need to speak with a pastor. We created an account called “pastorsoncall” and setup a call group for the POC based on the POC schedule. Here is the flow.
Each Pastor with the responsibility of being on call will need to download and install the Teams mobile client on their smartphone and sign into it.
The way the POC will have to work starting out in Teams is each Pastor is placed in a call group under the PastorsOnCall@fellowshiponline.com Teams account.
It will ring in the order you add the members. Be sure to add the main POC 1st, then the two alternates based on the POC schedule.
It will ring the 1st POC for 20 seconds and will try the next POC if the 1st POC doesn’t pick up within 20 seconds, and then the third if the 2nd doesn’t pick up.
The schedule will need to be changed each Monday but you can login to Teams as pastorsoncall@fellowshiponline.com from anywhere and do it.
I’m interested in a way to automate this as well with possibly some type of POC calendar and maybe Microsoft Flow but I haven’t had the time to research that yet.
I forgot to mention the “no answer” destination is forwarded to the main pastor on call persons voicemail box if none of the three pastors pickup the call.
I’ve solved this in a kind of convoluted but entirely automated way. Briefly documented here for posterity, DM me if you come across this and want details.
The Call Queue/Off-hours Auto Attendant now forward to a Teams user with Phone System. That user forwards to Flowroute number, because Flowroute has a reasonable API that actually exists (unlike Teams for user-based actions).
So now I’m using Microsoft Power Automate to pull the mobile number of the pastor on call from a care schedule in Ministry Platform using that API, then writing that number as the forward destination for the Flowroute number. Our Life Help team was already putting in the care schedule to use with Care Cases, so now they have one less thing to do - the automation sets the mobile forward instead of them changing it. There’s a cost for minutes on Flowroute and for a Power Automate license to use the HTTP connectors, but it works!
Future improvements: if Microsoft ever develops an API that can set user settings (like exists for Skype for Business on-prem), then I’ll remove the Flowroute part of this and directly update the Teams user that handles the forward.