It appears that the idea I submitted for this long ago was either removed, or I cannot find it, so I'm reposting it again. Per Vocera, this functionality was on the roadmap a few years ago, so I wanted to make sure I refreshed it as it's constantly asked about by our end users.

What the end users would like is the ability for you to text message a group and not have to worry about whether or not they're online. The problem we run into is if users message a permanent group, let's say 3 West Nurse, every 3 West Nurse is getting it. This is because the end user isn't messaging a temporary role to only reach people who are online. In the meantime, I have created "On Duty" groups that only reference temporary roles in Vocera as a workaround. However, not every floor/department was set up with temporary groups, nor want to in some cases. If Vocera had the ability to let the end user select if they only wanted to message users online, this would alleviate this frustration, as well as extra admin work on the backend/workarounds.

Scenario:
The 3 West Charge Nurse wants to message her staff to let them know that there is going to be a team meeting at 10PM. She messages the group "3 West Nurse", and doesn't realize that 55 of the 75 3 West Nurses aren't currently on duty/online for work that day. While inadvertent, the 3 West Charge Nurse receives a bunch of complaints from the Nurses who were off duty/offline saying that they're getting annoyed about the excessive notifications they receive once they come back to work after a week.