Managing Groups

The Microsoft Communicator client enables users to organize their contacts by placing them inside groups. By default, the group is Other Contacts.

On the Contact menu at the top of the screen, you can click Add a Group. When this is clicked, a new group called New Group displays. This can be renamed to anything of the user’s choosing.

These groups show a status of how many contacts there are in that group and how many are currently online. For example, you might see Other Contacts (4/5) to indicate that four of the five contacts in that group are online. You can expand the group by clicking the hollow triangle to the left of the name to populate the full list of contacts.

From the Contact menu, you can also choose to automatically group offline contacts together. This results in the creation of a group called Not Online. Contacts automatically move to this container when they are offline. Contacts can be dragged back and forth between groups, but can exist in only one group at a time. Groups can be deleted or renamed with the Contacts menu functions.

A convenient use of groups is to organize members of a project or department. By right-clicking the group name, you can choose to launch a conference call that will invite all members of that group. Similar functionality can be achieved by selecting multiple contacts by control-clicking them and then right-clicking to choose Start a Conference Call. This call can use Lync’s PC-to-PC call features or through the phone system.