Late last year I wrote a blog post about defining custom presence states for Microsoft Office Communicator. Unfortunately, when I updated my client to Office Communicator 2007 R2, the custom presence states stopped appearing.
One of my colleagues told me that by default, Office Communicator 2007 R2 doesn’t support reading the custom presence information from a local file and that it has to come from a secure web server. I tried that without success (using Windows Live SkyDrive to serve the file as HTTPS) but the fix that eventually worked for me was to add another registry key – a DWORD value for EnableSIPHighSecurity (set to 0), in the same location as the CustomStateURL:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator]
@=""
"CustomStateURL"="file:///C:/Users/username/Documents/presence.xml"
"EnableSIPHighSecurityMode"=dword:00000000
Whilst I’m revisiting this topic, it’s probably worth highlighting a couple more resources:
- Configuring custom presence states in Communicator 2007 R2 (Microsoft TechNet). This gives plenty of technical detail – note that you cannot set an Away state, nor can you have more than 4 custom presence states (I found that with 5 entries in the XML it fails to display any of them) and that the locale IDs are listed elsewhere on MSDN.
- Tom Pacyk has a Communicator 2007 Custom Presence tool for generating the necessary XML configuration file and registry entry (not the
EnableSIPHighSecurityModeone though).