Custom Call Park – Define your own ranges and timeouts!

So whilst looking over the what’s new in Teams for November here i noticed Custom Call Park is here. Whoop i hear you say. Previously you could use Call park but only with predefined number ranges so you had to make sure the number range didn’t clash with anything else but now you can define custom start and end ranges for Call Park.

By default, the range of call pickup numbers is from 10-99.

NOW custom ranges are between 10-9999.

Call timeout which is the number of seconds to wait before ringing back when a call is not picked up is

Default value is 300 seconds.

Allowed range is 120-1800 seconds

What is Call Park ?

Call park and retrieve is a feature that lets a user place a call on hold.

When a call is parked, Teams generates a unique code for retrieval of thats placed on Hold.

The user who parked the call or someone else can then use that code to retrieve the call.

I often hear this feature being used at B&Q or other homeware DIY store are available of course, i hear call on line 1235 so some can walk to a phone enter the number 1235 and pick up the caller thats on hold. magic! But wait not its not magic its Call Park in Teams.

How do i configure Call Park

You must be a Teams administrator as this is configured via Teams Admin Centre or PowerShell.

From Teams Admin centre go to

Voice > Call Park Policies

This will open Call Park

There is by default a global policy that is assigned to all users, if you modify this policy it will enable this policy with the call park range settings to all users.

OR you can create a custom policy and apply it to selected users.

Ill create a custom ranges as im testing

Create custom range via Teams Admin Center

Click Add

Define you call park policy by adding title, description, turn on call park, define your call park start and end ranges and park timeout.

Ive gone all custom

What i did find when defining the range i got an error message like below but don’t worry thats because you haven’t completed the end of range as i have 1000 start and 99 end and the end number has to be higher. So complete your start and end ranges and remember start need to be lower than end and end larger than start and your all good.

Once ready click Save

Assign to a user

Go to Users > Manage Users

Select your user and go to Policies tab

Click Edit by assigned policies

Select your custom policy and click apply

Verify

Now test – It could take a bit of time to apply so be patient 🙂

PowerShell

Create new range

New-CsTeamsCallParkPolicy -Identity “My Custom Call Park Policy” -AllowCallPark $true -PickupRangeStart 1000 -PickupRangeEnd 1999 -ParkTimeoutSeconds 120

Docs link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/skype/new-csteamscallparkpolicy?view=skype-ps

Assign to user via PowerShell

Grant-CsTeamsCallParkPolicy -PolicyName ‘My Custom Call Park Policy‘ -Identity “Adele Vance”

User Experience

If in Teams i make a call to another user Alex

Here im using the browser

if i hit more actions then i see Park Call and it Parks the Call and assigns a code from the range that’s defined in the call park policy.

In the browser i see the call is parked and im back to the Call App where i can see the Parked Code and i have the option to “copy code” and i could use this to send it via chat to someone else for example. Below you can see the call thats parked highlighted in blue with the Parked Code from the custom Call Park policy i defined above 🙂 so its working. Yay!

In the desktop client the call windows will display the code and a copy code code button and you have to close the window.

The parked caller gets to hear the hold music whilst they are parked.

I sent the code to Adele