Automated Status Updates

Presence is a great indicator of a user’s willingness to communicate, but if left to the users to manually manage, it tends to be inaccurate. A user cannot always remember to change his presence to Busy when walking into a meeting or back to Available when returning to his desk, so Lync Server leverages a user’s calendar and manages these kinds of updates on his behalf. If a user has an appointment on the calendar, his presence automatically changes to Busy during the appointment and then goes back to Available when the appointment concludes.

Endpoints also differentiate between personal calendar entries considered appointments and meetings with multiple attendees. In the preceding example, if the calendar entry is a meeting instead of an appointment, the status changes to In a Meeting instead of Busy, indicating that the user is most likely in the company of others and probably is engaged in conversation.

This calendar integration can be performed from Microsoft Office Outlook if installed, or if the user’s mailbox is hosted by a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 or later, endpoints can use Exchange Web Services to log in and pull the calendar data directly from the mailbox using Lync Server credentials.

In addition to the calendar integration, Lync Server keeps track of a user’s activity at an endpoint and can automatically mark an endpoint as Inactive or Away after a certain period. This ensures that if a user has walked away from an endpoint without changing his presence, subscribers can see the last presence state with an Inactive designation as part of the status. Even though the user is still signed in, subscribers can tell they probably won’t get a response when trying to initiate a conversation.