By default, Office Communicator and Communicator Web Access enable users to set their presence to one of the following five states:

Administrators can provide users with another option for setting their presence: Appear Offline. 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. However, this user is actually logged on, and, despite appearances, is able to take part in conversations and conferences.

Note:
Office Communicator also makes it possible for users to create and display custom presence states (for example, Working at Home or In Training Session). These custom presence states are not available to Communicator Web Access users.

To give users the option to set their presence to Appear Offline, you must create a new registry key and registry value on the computer running Communicator Web Access. This option is configured on a per-server basis. If you want users to have the Appear Offline option regardless of which Communicator Web Access server they log on to, you need to make this registry change on each client computer running Communicator Web Access.

To enable users to appear offline

  1. Log on to a computer that is running Communicator Web Access as a member of the local Administrators group.

  2. Click Start, and then click Run.

  3. In the Rundialog box, type regedit, and then press ENTER.

  4. In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expand Software, expand Policies, expand Microsoft, click Communicator, and then do one of the following:

    • If the Policykey already exists, go to step 6.

    • If the Policykey does not exist, right-click Communicator, point to New, and then click Key.

  5. After the new registry key is created, type Policyto rename the key.

  6. Right-click the new Policyregistry key, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.

  7. After the new value is created, type EnableAppearOfflineto rename the value.

  8. Double-click the new EnableAppearOfflineregistry value.

  9. In the Edit DWORD (32-bit) Valuedialog box, type 1in the Value databox, and then click OK.