Why Presence Matters - Microsoft Lync

One of the biggest changes that bringing a system like Microsoft Lync into the enterprise does is introduce the concept of presence.  Now presence is nothing new-public IM systems and gaming platforms have had it for years, and even many offices had “analogue presence” with an in/out board or other mechanism to know who was where and when.  It’s reasonably easy to dismiss presence as a gimmick until you live with it for a week. Then you’ll wonder how you got on without it.  Here’s a couple of examples of why presence matters:

Don’t phone someone who isn’t there

If you know someone isn’t at their desk, why waste the time to phone them, get to their voicemail, and not bother leaving a message? Instead, look at their presence:

If I see this in Lync, I know that Flo’s away, so I won’t even bother trying to phone him, since he probably won’t answer.

Don’t contact someone when they’re in a meeting

By the same token, sometimes people are around, but in a meeting, which shows up in Microsoft Lync like this:

In this case, Nicolas didn’t even have to change his presence, since Lync is able to grab calendar information from Exchange to determine when you’re available.  Note that this information from exchange includes out of office reminders, so even if someone is on vacation, you’ll know before sending an email.

Tell people where you are

For cases where people are mobile, working from home offices, or are otherwise in other locations, quite often what you’ll see is a flurry of emails first thing in the morning telling the rest of the team (or the entire organization) where they’ll be that day.  With Microsoft Lync, you get this:

So I know that Martin is working from home today (again), which would explain why I don’t see him at his desk.  I can still call, email, or IM him though.  Note that this can also be set automatically in the Microsoft Lync client.  The first time you launch in a location, look below your own presence and you should see a “Set your Location” option:

Click “Set your location”, and you’ll be able to type something more descriptive for the location you’re in:

And that’s it.  Best of all, the next time you launch in the same location, your location is set automatically, so now anyone on my team knows whether I’m in the office or working from home.

Find presence where you need it

Once Lync is installed, presence icons will start showing up in places like Outlook, SharePoint, Dynamics, and anywhere else that’s added support for them:

Here, in the header for an email, I can already tell who’s online, and who I could respond to directly without having to open Microsoft Lync.

Figure out when someone is available

These days, when I need to get in touch with someone, I’ll check their presence.  If they’re online, great-I can send an IM, or even go over and talk to them face to face if I want (since I know when they’re at their desk).  If they show up as away, busy, do not disturb, or any other presence state though, I’ll usually tag them to have Lync tell me when they are available.  To do this, right click a contact and select “Tag for status change alerts”:

Once you do this, you can keep going about your day until you get a notice that looks like this:

This window tells you that the contact you tagged has become available again, and you can launch a conversation right from this popup.  Conveniently, you can also untag a contact right from this popup, in case you don’t need to know every time they switch to an available state.

So obviously, presence is a big deal, and this was only a very high level introduction of why an end user might care about presence.  Once it’s in place, communication gets much more efficient-at a glance you can tell who is willing and available to communicate, where they are, and how they’re able to be reached.  There are many more things we could say about presence here, and we probably will in future updates, but I hope that this gives you some sense of why presence is useful.