My company upgraded to Office Communicator 2007 as our standard messaging platform from Communicator 2005. One of the features of 2005 that was nice was the 'appear offline' mode. This allowed me to get work done without people bothering me but I could monitor for when someone came on that I may need to talk to; the classic lurker situation.
Enter Communicator 2007. With this I quickly realized that the feature was not there. Bumming I quickly went to find out if it was possible. Turns out the team left it off on purpose but like any good programming team made it so that it can be enabled. First though, the reasons why they did not enable it are worth noting so here they are:
Microsoft's Tom Laciano writes on his post:
- It reduces the value of presence if everyone is lurking/hiding as “Appear Offline” (e.g. imagine if everyone in the company did it). Within working hours there is no reason to use “Appear Offline” as opposed to DnD
- Once you go beyond OC as an IM client and think about OC as a phone it doesn’t make much sense to use “Appear Offline” as that will cause all phone calls and such to go to voicemail. It is also not a very good way to hide anymore given than everyone is expected to have a phone and so you won’t see very many people as offline anymore (i.e. there is no reason to see someone as offline as their phone should always be connected so at worst they should be away)
Ok. Now that you know why and you have given it careful consideration, here is how to re-enable it:
- Open registry editor and go to the following registry entry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator - Add the following key to above mentioned entry
EnableAppearOffline (Type:DWORD), set value to 1 to enable status option - Now close the registry editor and restart Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, new status option should now be available.
One thing to note, this can be overridden by group policy.
Enjoy your newly found lurker status.