Custom Presence States In Lync 2010…

Apart from the default presence states in Lync 2010 – Available, Busy, Do not disturb, Be right back, Off work, Appear away & Appear offline (if enabled), you (as an administrator) can configure upto four custom presence states which suit your business.

A consultancy company can have “Meeting with customer”, “Working on design docs”, “Working from home” etc as their custom states to let the other staff know as to what he/she is upto.

All we need is a customized xml file (Technet provides example xml files) and a shell command to configure the client policy to point to the location of the xml file.

The content of the xml file is as follows. (Technet Help here)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<customStates xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2009/communicator/customStates"
  <customState ID="1" availability="online">
    <activity LCID="2057">Working from Home</activity>
      </customState>
  <customState ID="2" availability="busy">
    <activity LCID="2057">Meeting with a customer</activity>
      </customState>
  <customState ID="3" availability="busy">
    <activity LCID="2057">Meeting with Customer</activity>
      </customState>
  <customState ID="4" availability="do-not-disturb">
    <activity LCID="2057">Working on design docs</activity>
  </customState>
</customStates>

The LCID stands for Location ID, which is 2057 for English –UK. Full list of LCID here.

Save the customized file on the server and make sure that it can be accessed as “https://server fqdn/customstates.xml”. Edit the default client policy (you can also create a new policy) to add the “customstateurl” by running the command below

Get-CsClientPolicy | Set-CsClientPolicy –CustomStateURL “https://hewlync2010.hew.local/customstates.xml”

You can also save the xml file to a file share on the server and set the customstateurl to “file://\\server.domain.local\share\presence.xml”.

Log out & login to Lync client to find the new custom states.