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Voice Policies

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Enterprise Voice policies are essentially collections of phone usage records that are assigned to one or more users. Policies also include an option of enabling or disabling the simultaneous ringing feature. The simultaneous ringing feature enables users to configure Communicator such that incoming calls, in addition to ringing the users registered endpoints, also ring an additional nonregistered endpoint, such as a personal mobile phone. Normally, simultaneous ringing should be enabled, but in the event of excessive congestion, you have the ability to disable this feature.

Most organizations will have multiple voice policies, typically a default policy that applies to all users and one or more special policies that are applied on a per-user basis. You have the option of creating your own voice policies from scratch or editing existing policies.

Phone usage order is critical because in matching users to routes, the server compares phone usages from top to bottom. If the first usage matches the call route, the call is routed. The remaining phone usages provide backup in the event of route congestion or call failure.

Defining voice policies for users includes:

  • Creating a default policy for your organization. This policy will apply to all users to whom you have not explicitly assigned a per user policy.

  • Defining one or more per-user policies as needed.

  • Adding one or more phone usage records.

  • Specifying whether to enable the simultaneous ringing feature for Enterprise Voice users (not available if you are enabling PBX integration).

  • You create voice policies in the Communications Server 2007 MMC snap-in.

  • If you want to apply a single policy to all Enterprise Voice users in your organization, then you need only to choose or customize the default policy.

  • If you want to apply special policies to certain individuals or groups of Enterprise Voice users, then you must choose the Use per user option, and then create one or more special policies and explicitly assign them to specific individuals or groups of users. Any users to whom you do not explicitly assign a policy will be governed by the default policy.