By default everyone in your company is able to see your Office Communicator Presence. This is a great feature, because you don't have to have someone on your contact list and you can still see his or her availability in other applications (e.g. Office Outlook or Office Sharepoint Server). This empowers you to use the benefits of Unified Communications and to decide – based on your colleague’s status – whether it’s better to write an email, start an IM or...

April 2013 Update: Service shut down date confirmed as June 30, 2014. As of September 1 st , 2012, the Microsoft Lync Public IM Connectivity User Subscription License (“PIC USL”) is no longer available for purchase for new or renewing agreements. Customers with active licenses will be able to continue to federate with Yahoo! Messenger until the service shut down date (exact date TBD, but no sooner than June 2013). The PIC USL is a per-user per-month subscription...

I’d like to share a new and very cool feature found in the OC client for the 2007 release. Scenario: Say you are using Office Communicator’s (OC) audio/video capabilities with your peers and your discussion is directed at a document found on your machine. You are editing the document during the conversation and it would be beneficial for everyone to see edits as they are made. From OC, with a click of a button, you start a Live Meeting (LM) session and everyone in...

Ever been on the road and wanted to dial into a Conference from your regular phone? We’ve got something new to help you in Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2. In previous releases, if a user wanted to join a scheduled OCS conference from their regular phone (cell phone, home phone, etc.), the only way they can get into the conference is to have a Leader/Presenter dial-out to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) user. If there are more than a...

Dear Mr. Presence, Microsoft Lync has a great status note that I can set to let others know about my status. Often times, though, I just want to know what is going on with others in my team. Is there a way to view everyone’s note, with the most recent first? -Actively Engaged Dear Actively Engaged, You are in luck! With Lync 2010 you can view the notes of all the Contacts in your Lync Contacts List sorted chronologically. Just click on the Activity Feed...

As Rajesh mentioned earlier, Office Communicator 2007 R2 packs more than its name. You can see quite a few enhancements in the Instant Message area as well. One of these enhancements is the improved support for IM rich text and HTML clipboard operations. This enables copy/paste operations from a variety of sources like Word™, OneNote™, Excel™, browser etc. The pasted content preserves most of the formatting information such as font, table layout, indentation...

Call handling options are displayed differently in Lync 2013 than in Lync 2010. With the new “hover" experience, you can find your call controls by hovering over different icons to display a menu. Let's take a look at the Lync 2013 call handling options. Muting yourself: While in a call, you can mute yourself by clicking on the Call button in the call window or by hovering over the Call button and clicking on “Mute” in the pop-up menu. TIP: If you...

Data overage occurs when the user’s cellular network download data goes over the limits of the subscribed cellular data plan, and subsequently user incurs charges beyond the set tariff. Although data overage may happen in home network, the chances for it are heightened while in roaming network. The Connect while Roaming (CWR) feature in CoMo for Nokia has been devised to avoid incurring data overage while in roaming network. To turn ‘on’ or ‘off’...

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 (aka Communicator) has made it easier to work with a variety of different audio and video devices. In majority of the cases, if you simply attach a device to the computer, Communicator automatically detects your new device and selects it as the preferred device if it is more capable than the other devices already plugged into the system. In case you do need change a device selection or if you simply want to test and tune...

The contact list in Office Communicator (OC) 2007 has a very similar look and feel to lists in other instant messaging clients. However there are some fundamental contact list differences between Office Communicator and other IM clients. I would like take this chance to talk about the structure of the OC contact list and provide some tips for organizing it. If you’re an OC user, you may have already noticed there are two groups you can’t delete from the contact list...