How to correct/modify user presence info

Question

 

Hello,

We are having issues with the presence icon menu displaying on our people search results page in Sharepoint. 

#1: While we would like to display presence information, the menu being rendered on different computers is not consistent.  Certain users see a menu option “View My Site” which points to a defunct site residing on an old server that is not even part of our current SharePoint farm.

#2: In addition, certain users require that their busy/free status information not appear.  We have tried manipulating their Outlook settings to not publish their free/busy status and restarting their Outlook with the /cleanfreebusy switch but the sharepoint page suggests they are “Free for Next 8 Hours” when in fact they are not.

I have scoured the web for insight into where SharePoint is obtaining the presence information.  Everything I’ve read suggests that the name.dll control installed on the client is communicating with either a server version of Office Communicator or a client version of one of the Windows instant messaging clients, the latter only being able to display status information for users in the client contact’s list. This, however, seems inconsistent with our setup.  I’ve been assured by our network admins that we are not running OCS or LCS, and yet users see the presence menu for all sharepoint users.  From where is SharePoint pulling this presence information and how can it be updated/modified to address the two issues described above? 

My issues are similar to the problems described in these two posts:

 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/93015324-5495-43a1-8f45-305c2195bfd8

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsocialcomputing/thread/06e173d4-74b9-4c6f-88b5-b269ac55deb6

If anyone can help shed light on this, it would be very much appreciated.

Answer 1

Vic,

I'll give it a shot.

Yes, NAME.DLL is the magic bullet. Unfortunatly it is sealed and there is little you can do to change the output. (Short of writing and registering your own version.) AFAIK, the DLL uses AutoDiscover to find your exchange server and gets all the data from there. If there is no IM client (Communicator or IM) I don't know where it would get the status from (sorry).

As you have found, there is very little info available on how this all works. Remember too that there is also a Free/Busy control on the Profile page too.

I don't think I have been very helpful.

M

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Matthew McDermott, MVP MOSS