Use Office Communicator in 'Appear Offline' Mode

Most of us use Microsoft Office Communicator at work. There could be various occasions when one might have wanted to be online but invisible to contacts. I bet the ‘Managers’ want this badly.

By default, Office Communicator 2007 R2 enable users to set their presence to one of the following five states:-

There is a way to enable ‘Appear Offline’ mode in Office Communicator. When a user selects this option, he or she appears to be offline. In fact, all of the user’s contacts see a presence icon indicating the user is offline.

For the users to have the option of "Appear Offline" you must create a new registry key and registry value on the computer running Office Communicator.

Caution:
Incorrectly editing the registry may severely damage your system. Before making changes to the registry, you should back up any valued data on the computer.

Here are the steps:-

1. Log on to a computer that is running Office Communicator.
2. Click Start, and then click Run.
3. In the Run dialog box, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
4. In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expand Software, expand Policies, expand Microsoft, click Communicator.
5. Right-click the Communicator registry key, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.
6. After the new value is created, type EnableAppearOffline to rename the value.
7. Double-click the new EnableAppearOffline registry value.
8. In the Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog box, type 1 in the value data box, and then click OK.

 

After making above change, exit from Office Communicator (from system tray) and relaunch it. After signing back to Office Communicator you should able to see "Appear Offline" on the  option of the Office Communicator.