OCS Response Groups not being able to dial an external extension

My main man Doug is back at it again with another quick fix to an OCS problem. This time it’s to do with response groups. I had an issue a few weeks back that required a response group to forward a call to our Enterprise help desk that is external to OCS, but for some reason I could not get the timeout function of the queue to forward to an external number. As I have mentioned before Doug is a pretty bright dude so I bugged him about it. With a bit of investigative work Doug was able to narrow down the issue in pretty short order. Here is Doug’s blog entry that describes the issue and solution, as well as the process to narrow down the issue.

The problem is based around the response group’s use of the default voice policy. Basically if you have no routes for the default policy, forwarding to external PSTN or other numbers is not going to work. After reviewing Doug’s work I went for the simple solution and added a restrictive route to the default phone usage record to allow outbound routing from the response group. Seeing as response groups is the only object that will ever use the default I felt it was a pretty safe bet.