Knowing your co-workers presence certainly improves how, when and if you interact with them. However, not every employee wants their fellow co-workers tracking when they sign-in or are away. Two hour Friday lunches anyone? Executives, CEOs, and managers may not care what employees below them think, and they never want them to see when they are or aren't there. This is where the "Appear Offline" presence state comes in handy. Most IM applications allow this, including Skype, MSN Messenger, and others. However, when it comes to business IM applications such as Office Communicator, you may not want to allow employees to "Appear offline" or at least you'll want to restrict the privilege to just executives and managers.By default Office Communicator does not support "Appear offline" since the whole point of Microsoft's unified communications strategy is to "share" information to improve communications in the enterprise. However, you can easily add it by doing the following:
Log on to a computer that is running Communicator Web Access as a member of the local Administrators group.
Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Run dialog box, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expand Software, expand Policies, expand Microsoft, click Communicator, and then do one of the following:
- If the Policy key already exists, go to step 6.
- If the Policy key does not exist, right-click Communicator, point to New, and then click Key.
After the new registry key is created, type Policy to rename the key.
Right-click the new Policy registry key, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.
After the new value is created, type EnableAppearOffline to rename the value.
Double-click the new EnableAppearOffline registry value.
In the Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog box, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
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