Defining custom presence states for Office Communicator 2007 R2

This content is 15 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

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:

12 thoughts on “Defining custom presence states for Office Communicator 2007 R2

  1. Yap this worked. From last couple of days I was try for the custom presence without a luck on OC R2. However, EnableSIPHighSecurityMode worked and I am getting all my status in OC.

  2. I want to use the inactive icon as my custom status. (Half green and half yellow), do you know what to define in custom xml. I tried the following with no luck.

    <customState ID=”4″ availability=”inactive”>
    <activity LCID=”1033″>Inactive</activity>
    </customState>

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