New Contact List Features in Office Communicator 2007 R2

Office
Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 is finally here, and I hope you’ve had a
chance to explore some of the cool new features Rajesh mentions in his blog post. 
Although the release was mostly focused on enhancing the voice
experience, we also made some updates to the contact list to improve the
contacts experience. 

Sort by display name

In
OC 2007, contacts within groups are sorted by status (availability/busy
contacts appear first followed by away, offline and presence unknown
contacts), and are sub-sorted by display name.  When a contact’s status
changes from available to away, the contact’s position changes within
the group.  This made it difficult for users to find people in large
groups because the contact ordering in a group is unpredictable.  In OC
2007 R2, we added an option to sort contacts by display name.   This
option can be found under the view menu.  Once it’s selected, contacts
are sorted by display name within a group and you should no longer see
the contacts ordering change when there are status changes.  

Persist group ordering

In
OC 2007, the ordering of groups was not persisted between OC sessions
which caused a lot of confusion for users who have one or two groups
they always want to see at the top of the contact list. We have fixed
this issue in OC 2007 R2 and the ordering of groups is persisted between
sessions on the local machine.

Add phone only contacts to the contact list

A
new feature is the support of phone only contacts in the contact list. 
This is a really useful feature for those who use OC to dial phone
numbers. 

A
phone only contact refers to any contact that has a phone number but no
email or IM address.  You can search for a phone only contact that is
an Outlook contact, and add the contact to the contact list via drag and
drop.  

Notice
that phone only contacts have a phone icon in next to the display name.
The icon is used to differentiate phone only contacts from other types
of contacts.  Double clicking on a phone only contact initiates a phone
call, whereas double clicking on contacts with the presence jellybean
opens an instant messaging conversation. 

Once
the phone only contact is in the contact list, you can right click and
select properties to open the Outlook contact inspector.  If you update
the Outlook contact and add an IM/email address to the phone only
contact, this will convert the contact to a presence contact. 

 

Cindy Kwan
Program Manager

Published Monday, April 13, 2009 10:50 AM
by
octeam

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