Enable 'Appear Offline' status on Lync 2013

Most of us use Microsoft Lync 2013 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, Microsoft Lync 2013 enable users to set their presence to one of the following six states:-

There is a way to enable ‘Appear Offline’ mode in Lync 2013. 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 Lync 2013.

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:-

To add Registry entry using Command Prompt

1. Open Command prompt with Administrative privileges.
2. Type or copy paste below registry entry and press Enter button from Keyboard.

reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync /v EnableAppearOffline /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f 

3. Now Exit Lync 2013 and reopen the same. Now you will “AppearOffline” status.


To add Registry entry using Windows Registry

1. Open Registry and go to

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync

Note: If you are unable to see any folder then create folder.

2. Right click on blank space and select REG_DWORD (32 or 64 bit) per machine.
3. Type value name as ‘EnableAppearOffline’ and value data is “1”.

4. Now Exit Lync 2013 and reopen the same. Now you will “AppearOffline” status.