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!

Call pick-up is the function when one user can pick-up his phone, enter some predefined number and get call from other phone which is currently ringing.

It is useful in situations when somebody calls your colleague and you do not want to jump from your place and run to his working place to answer his phone.

Instead you pick-up your phone, enter some predefined number and get this call to your phone.

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