What are callgroups and pickupgroups

Letting someone else answer a call

In the mgcp, SIP, IAX, Asterisk Skinny Channels and the zapata channels you can define call and pickup groups for phones. Note that call pickup typically only works WITHIN a technology, e.g. from a SIP phone to a SIP phone and not ACROSS technologies, e.g. not from a SIP phone to a IAX phone.

The basic functionality is this:

   * A call is placed in one or several call groups
   * If a phone belongs in a pickup group that matches one of the call's call groups, that phone may pickup the incoming call by calling *8# on his phone
   * In v1-0, the feature code seems to be *8# on zap channels, and *8 on SIP channels: *8# does not seem to work from a SIP phone (unless your phone is configured to interpret # as ENTER key) 

Groups are in interval 0-63.

You define call and pickupgroup per device, like:

callgroup=1
pickupgroup=1-9,13

Common misconception

Callgroups are not intended to call a group of phones; all a callgroup entry does is to help define who is permitted to perform a pick-up for which calls!

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• Info taken from: http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+callgroups+and+pickupgroups