Mario Esposito @ uncle Bill's house

Custom presence status for Office Communicator 2007

A few coworkers have recently asked if it was possible to customize the status shown by Office Communicator. Yes, it is possible. Be aware that you should always and I mean really REALLY always contact your administrator before you compromise or expose your corporate network security. </legalwarning>

Ok now the fun part: 

You may are not completely satisfied by the basic presence indications you can use with OC: available, busy, away … Communicator 2007 client allows you to configure and use customized presence information. The question that I answer today is how you can do the actual customization:

• Create an .XML file (any name will do it - i.e: custom.xml) with a content similar to this :
  <customStates>
      <customState ID="1" availability="online">
          <activity LCID="1033">Working from Home</activity>
      </customState>
      <customState ID="2" availability="busy">
          <activity LCID="1033">Playing HALO 3</activity>
      </customState>
      <customState ID="3" availability="busy">
          <activity LCID="1033">Meeting with Customer</activity>
      </customState>
      <customState ID="4" availability="do-not-disturb">
          <activity LCID="1033">Debugging</activity>
      </customState>
  </customStates>
  
• Make the file you have created above accessible. As rule of thumb if you can access at the file through any of the following protocols you're in a good shape. 
  • File share
  • HTTP(s)
• Create the following registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator\CustomStateURL = file://server/share/custom.xml

• Restart Office Communicator.

Enjoy