Custom presence states in Office Communicator

Published 27 September 07 11:22 AM | Ewan 

 I just discovered how to modify presence states in Office Communicator 2007: it's documented in the Office Communicator Deployment imageGuide (page 21, if you're interested), and allows for either  the managed deployment of Communicator with additional corporate-set presence states, or if a user is savvy enough to do it themselves, they could have some fun...

The custom states appear like shown in this screenshot (the one in the deployment guide seems to be in error - it doesn't actually show any custom states), and you can have up to 4 of them and set which of the coloured statuses you want to apply to each of your defined presence states.

I'd originally noticed this was possible when I glanced down at the beautiful screen on my newly-acquired "Tanjay" phone (as shown on Gurdeep's desk here, along with a bunch of other UC devices, and akin to the LG-Nortel 8540), and I saw Adrian's status was "Delivering ..."

img014

... which set me off to find out how he'd done it. Note my own status is also displayed on the Tanjay, and updates in real time...

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Comments

# Snaap said on September 28, 2007 5:50 PM:

Another way to apply this? With the communicator.adm

In this group policy people can provide the custom state url. It's more easy and less tricky. Btw, it seems the Microsoft documentation appears to be incorrect. The gray text block on Page 21 is missing "Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00". After trying to merge the reg file I found out this piece of text was missing. Based on that I wanted to find another way to apply the custom presence states.

# Ewan said on October 3, 2007 6:28 AM:

Thanks for teh comment, Snaap - I've fed this back to the people responsible for the comment (that and the screen shot error on the same page).

# Bryan said on October 9, 2007 4:29 PM:

What are the availability codes?  away doesn't seem to be one of them.

Thanks

# Ewan said on October 10, 2007 8:42 AM:

Bryan - it seems that Away isn't one of the options; according to the deployment guide:

• Custom states can be configured with: Available, Busy, and Do Not Disturb.

Ewan

# The Electric Wand said on October 25, 2007 2:17 AM:

A quick follow on to my post the other day about having custom presence states in Office Communicator

# Aaron Tiensivu's Blog said on October 29, 2007 1:17 AM:

The best part of using custom presence states is the fact that your message will display on phones just like the normal presence states of "Busy", "Be Right Back", etc. Not sure what I am talking about? Sometimes a picture helps, so check this out:

# The Electric Wand said on April 6, 2009 1:38 AM:

I posted a while back about custom presence states ( here and here ). Well it turns out that a change

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Ewan Dalton:: Some hopefully sensible commentary around various technologies, starting with Exchange Server and other communications technologies but anything to do with software and electronics, basically... I've been at Microsoft for over 10 years so have a rich history of playing with stuff that's in development.

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