The Three UC Amigos - Cool Microsoft Blog

If you are looking for OCS-UC solutions for the educational community, look no farther, check this out:
http://blogs.technet.com/ucedsg/default.aspx

Here is a great answer to Microsoft OCS Call Center solution call center solution called Response Group

Here's an animated explanation: ocs-response-group.swf

Here's the highlights:
Response Group Service includes the following features:

- Supported Call Routing Algorithms Response Group Service supports standard response group call-routing algorithms, including serial, longest-idle, parallel, and round robin. Routing algorithms are configured for each defined group of agents.

- Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Call navigation employs IVR, which detects and recognizes both speech and dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) keypad input. Response Group Service IVR also supports text-to-speech and the WAV file format. The administrator can update IVR prompts.

- Call Queuing Calls are queued pending the availability of an agent configured to accept the call.

- Music-On-Hold Callers are put on music-on-hold until an agent becomes available.

- Presence-based routing Call routing takes agent presence status into account.

The routing component would skip, for example, agents who are signed out or busy.

Response Group Templates Predefined response group templates make it easy for an administrator to create a new response group. The administrator uses the response group template to define the usage experience of the call, including questions asked to the caller, options given to the caller, music-on-hold options, and configuration of business hours and holidays.

Sorry the screen shots didnt copy but go to the blog for more.

What is a Response Group Service?

A new feature provided in OCS 2007 R2 is called the Response Group Service. It provides inbound call routing capabilities to call agents. There is no additional license required for this feature.

Response Group Service features include:

•Hunt groups and basic IVRs

• Support for end-users managing RGS

• Integration with OCS presence

• Speech recognition and Text to Speech in 12 languages

• Music on hold

• Basic CDRs

What components make up a Response Group?

There are four components of a response group:

Response Group - lives in AD as a contact object, 4 templates to chose from:

Basic hunt group

Enhanced hunt group - basic hunt group+hold music, welcome greeting

One level basic hunt group - enhanced hunt group+single level IVR

Two level basic hunt group - enhanced hunt group+double level IVR

Queue - set up for calls that aren't routed yet, can have multiple agent groups assigned to a queue

Agent Group - groups of agents that queues point to, configure routing methods:

parallel

serial

round robin

longest idle

Agent - users that Response Group routes calls to, either informal, formal or not active for agent group participation

How do I deploy the RGS?

RGS is installed by default with both Enterprise and Standard Edition OCS 2007 R2.

You manage queues, agent groups and agents via the MMC snap-in that gets installed when you install the OCS R2 administration tools.

You manage Response Groups via a web page. The RGS URL on the Front End format is the following: https://srv/Rgs/Deploy/Default.aspx

Contact objects used by the Response Group are created with the RGSCOT.exe command line tool which is installed with the OCS R2 administration tools.

What does the end user calling into a Response Group look like?

The end user would see response groups appear as searchable contact group associated with a cog icon.

What does the Agent experience look like?

The agent would receive a call on the left with "Transferred via 'response group name'" along with the information that the caller selected via IVR or DTMF for context for the agent.