Author: Ram Ojha

Publication date: May 2008

Product version: Office Communications Server 2007 R2

What is Enhanced Presence?

OCS 2007 allows its client applications to publish and subscribe to Enhanced Presence information. The enhanced presence infrastructure includes categories and containers. State, note, contact information, or calendar data (e.g. Free/Busy) are examples of categories. Containers are logical buckets into which the clients publish the categories of presence information.

A user can control what presence information other users see.  For example, if userA@fabrikam.com places userB@fabrikam.com in his Public container, userB can see only userA's name, e-mail address, and basic contact information. If userA places userB in his Personal container, userB can see detailed information like additional phone numbers, location etc.

OCS 2007 notifies watchers of presence changes for the container they have permission to access.  OCS 2007 supports this functionality through the use of Access Control Lists (ACLs) that map a user’s contacts into Containers.  Each end user can configure their ACLs via the “Access Level” or “Access Levels Management” view in the Office Communicator client.  ACL’s can define the set of users which can access a container based on a number of different criteria:

URI list (e.g. “userA@fabrikam.com”)
Domain List (e.g.“fabrikam.com”)
Same Enterprise
Federated Users
Public Cloud Users
 
 
 

 
Enhance Presence Feature Set

The main features of the enhanced presence model are as follows:

  • Enhanced presence status
  • Automatic sensing of activity
  • Access levels
  • Interruption management
  • Multiple points of presence (MPOP)
  • Extensible presence status
  • Integration with Office applications

 

To enable enhanced presence for a single user

  1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Administrative Tools, and then click Office Communications Server 2007.
  2. In the console tree, expand Communications Enterprise Edition Pools.
  3. Expand the pool that contains the user you want to enable for enhanced presence, and then click Users.
  4. In the details pane, right-click the user, and then Properties.
  5. In the Properties dialog box, click Configure.
  6. In the User Options dialog box, select the Enable enhanced presence check box.
  7. When the enabling enhanced presence message is displayed, read the information, and then click Yes to complete the enabling of enhanced presence for the user.

 

What happens when a user is enabled for enhanced presence?

After you have enabled your users for enhanced presence, deploy Office Communicator 2007 to all client computers for these users. After a user is enabled for enhanced presence, the user can no longer sign in to previous versions of Office Communicator, Communicator Web Access, or Communicator Mobile.

Note: When you do enable Enhanced Presence on the user object following the migration, the user is still able to sign-in using legacy clients. When the EH aware client signs-in, the database information is upgraded to include EH information. From this point forward, the legacy client does not function.

Any user created in OCS 2007 pool\server already has enhanced presence enabled and cannot be changed.

An example of user activity category publication in Enhanced Presence

For more information regarding Enhanced Presence, please see: 
http://communicatorteam.com/archive/2008/03/06/103.aspx
Important links:
OCS Enhanced Presence Model: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=df0ba247-3884-43c7-a1e1-791d64b8bfa8&displaylang=en
OCS Resource kit: http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/10482.aspx

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