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 

Microsoft Office Communicator Alerts and Windows 7

Every single user that we have moved to Widows 7 has had one complaint. Communicator alerts are not being seen. Most do not have audio and unless you are constantly paying attention, it just does not grab you attention like it did in Vista or XP.

"The answer is display settings in Windows 7"

If you zoom your display settings (Control Panel - All Control Panel Items - Display) to Medium (125%) or Larger (150%) You do not get incoming IM notifications or phone notifications with the exception of the flashing status icon in your task-bar.   Once we set this back to Smaller - 100% (default) the issue will be fixed

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Outlook Integration Error

When you try to log on to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 or Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 you receive the following error message:

Outlook Integration Error

Please follow the below solution to fix the issue.

Solution

1. Click Start, and then click Run.

2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then press ENTER.

3. Locate and then right-click the following registry subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator

4. Point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

5. Type DisableEmailComparisonCheck as the name of new registry entry, and then press ENTER.

6. Double-click DisableEmailComparisonCheck, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.

7. Exit Registry Editor.