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Enhancing Presence by adding new states

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I learnt some great things at TechReady - here is one of them

You have probably read that in OCS 2007 we can have enhanced presence.

What does this mean - well depending on the Organisation you work in there maybe states of presence that are more relevant and give added information.

For instance a health care worker in a hospital may prefer to have the state "In consultation" rather than just "Do not Disturb".

So how do you do it and what does it look like.

Well I have been playing with this and added the following two states to Communicator

Presence  

Hopefully you can see that under the normal presence states I have added "Working From Home" and  "Getting Coffee", slightly tongue in cheek but you get the idea.

The great thing about it is that it is easy to do either on a personal level or company level.

First you need to create an XML file with the following in - (just copy into notepad and rename .xml)

<customStates xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2005/communicator/customStates" xmlns:xsi="https://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="https://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2005/communicator/customStates
https://livecommteam/sites/main/ice/Wave%2012%20Docs/CustomActivities.xsd">
    <customState ID="1" availability="online">
        <activity LCID="1033">Working from Home</activity>
    </customState>
    <customState ID="2" availability="busy">
        <activity LCID="1033">Getting Coffee</activity>
    </customState>
</customStates>

You can see how to add the custom states and what you want to be shown as - another one you can use is availability="do-not-disturb"

So once this is done the file needs to be saved in a location and then the in the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator\CustomStateUrl you need to point to this file

file//\\computername\share\xmlfilename.xml

BTW the CustomStateUrl is a String Value.

And that is it.

So in my case I put this file and pointed to it on my local machine - this allows only me to use these states (but everyone else will see them.)

If you want to make them company wide then the regkey needs to point to a place that everyone can get to and the file placed there and the regkey needs to be updated on all client machines. A little more work but still very straight forward.

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