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How to Change the Sort Order of Contact List Groups

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Office Communicator allows you to create groups to sort your contacts.  You can also arranged those groups in any order you see fit.  So you can move a group that you use frequently to the top of the list, and move others to the bottom.  But have you ever wanted to reset that order back to default?  Maybe you'd rather have the groups alphabetized.  If you have a lot of groups, doing this manually might be tedious.  Instead there is an easier way.  If you open regedit and navigate to the following key:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Communicator\<SIP URI>\GroupStateCacheU

If you have moved groups around, you will see the following value.  If you haven't moved the groups around, this value will not be there:

SortGroups     REG_BINARY

If you delete this value, close Communicator, and sign back in, you will see that your groups have been reordered.

 

Before

After

*One thing to note is that the Recent Contacts group will always be the first group in the list.  You can always turn off the Recent Contacts group if you don't want it shown in the contact list.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    @Ed I tried it on Lync 2010 4.0.7577.4103 and when I rearranged groups, the SortGroups registry key was placed in the location mentioned in the post.  If I deleted that key and restarted Lync, the groups were ordered correctly.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    @Bob Thanks for the feedback!  As you can see from the screenshots in the post, the Other Contacts group for me was sorted alphabetically...not sure why you didn't see the same results.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    @dave Communicator 2007 R2 has an option called "Group Contacts by Availability".  If you do this as well as sort the groups, that should give you what you're looking for.  Lync 2010 should have a similar option as well.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    @Kevin There's an option to sort by availability in the drop down list that is next to the search bar.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    @Sasuke Xia Unfortunately, there is no way to sort the groups server-side.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks, It is very useful. I have  another question, how can I sort  the group  in the lync server side without modify registry key in the client side. The action should be useful for all users. Our Environment is lync server administrator use a script to add contact list for all users.

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2010
    Awesome! this blog has saved me a lot of frustration on multpile occasions!!! thank you!

  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2010
    I want my Contacts to be in order of Online, away, etc. How would I be able to do this PLease? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2011
    Thanks!  Worked like a charm!

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2011
    Thanks! My contacts groups suddenly sorted out randomly after installing Office 2010 suite, and I couldn't find a way to put them back alphabetically. This registry deletion did the work!

  • Anonymous
    November 23, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2011
    Thanks!! Suddenly my sort order got changed and I was scrambling around to get it re-ordered. This helped solve my problem. But it is amazing that this functionality is not available under "view" and has to be done through regedit...

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2012
    many thanks for the work around.

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2012
    This registry key does not exist for Microsoft Lync 2010.  How do you sort GROUP names within Lync.  It is kind of useless to create group names if you can't sort them.

  • Anonymous
    September 02, 2012
    Excellent!!! It was resolved my questions which I'm facing for a long time.

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 04, 2012
    Thanks for the great tip!  Even after doing this, Other Contacts was at the top of my list - wish it was at the bottom or sorted alphabetically.

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2012
    Thats great...helps a lot...Thanks

  • Anonymous
    December 19, 2012
    This is not working for Lync 2012. Anyone has any solution to arrange groups alphabetically? I have the maximum number of groups in Lync and it's not too tempting to order them manually

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2013
    Thank you, great tip.  It was very frustrating when you have a lot of groups out of order.

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2013
    Is there some way to sort by Groups and Status at the same time?

  • Anonymous
    September 05, 2013
    Except it doesn't WORK. Groups are sorted in random order.

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2015
    Perfect! Thank you!!!

  • Anonymous
    November 16, 2015
    Sorry, didn't work for MS Lync@ 2013 (15.0.4719.1000) MSO 32 bit installtion. After deleting 'REG_BINARY groups are still unordered in next login.