Monday, March 17, 2014

How to enable “Appear Offline” presence status in office communicator?

This artcile talks about how can you enable your MOC 2007 / Lync 2010 to have the status "Appear Offline". Once you have this status, you can set yourself to appear offline while you are online.
By default presence status in your office communicator will look like as follow.


There might be times when you want to login in office communicator but you don’t want to appear online. You would like to set the status as “appear offline”. Since you dont have this option by default in MOC 2007 or Lync 2010, you need to modify following group policy before you could get this option in MOC 2007 or Lync 2010.



The policy name is “Enable the state Appear Offline” in the group policy. You need to enable it and ensure that the policy gets applied. (You might want to run gpupdate /force after applying this change).
Note: You will get above group policy setting after importing Communicator.adm template in the group policy object.
You can enable “Appear offline” status in office communicator using registry editor as well.
You need to create following registry DWORD and set its value as 1 to enable it.
The DWORD name is EnableAppearOffline, type is REG_DWORD and location is
My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator.
After making above change, exit from office communicator (from system tray) and relaunch it.
After signing back into Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 or Lync 2010, you should be able to see “Appear offline” status 



Wednesday, March 5, 2014

FAQ: Granting "Logon as a batch job" to a user account in active directory

Question: How do I grant the Logon as a batch job privilege to an user account?

Answer: On Windows, this privilege is granted through the Local or Domain Security Policy. To do this using the Local Security Policy, follow these steps.

In the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, then Local Security Policy.

Beneath Security Settings, open Local Policies and highlight User Rights Assignment.

Locate Log on as a batch job. Open the properties and add any users that need this right.

When finished, save your changes and close the Local Security Settings window.


Your changes should take effect immediately. To make changes to the Domain Security Policy, on a domain controller, use the Domain Security Policy utility in the Control Panel.