OCS/Outlook Integration Presence Issues

We have been having a few issues with getting the OCS Presence Indictator working correctly with Outlook 2007. When you hover over the presence jelly bean in the Preview Pane, you get ‘Presence Unknown’ even through OCS and even Sharepoint detect the correct status:

After some extensive research, most people recommend the following registry key settings:

"REG_DWORD HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\PersonaMenu\RTCApplication=3"
"REG_DWORD HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\PersonaMenu\RTCApplication=3"

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\IM] "SetOnlineStatusLevel"=dword:00000003"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\PersonaMenu]
"QueryServiceForStatus"=dword:00000002

However, this didnt seem to resolve the issue. By experimentation, we tried:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\PersonaMenu]
"QueryServiceForStatus"=dword:00000002

and changed the dword value to 3. The presence is now working as expected. According to the Microsoft site, this can only be set to 0, 1 or 2.

Feel free to investigate and let me know how you get on!

Outlook Signatures Centralized

Keeping every ones Outlook email signature in line with company policy is a nightmare of a task. You often find users edit it slightly with images, different symbols for their phone number and most of all, the constant change in upcoming events or products.

I needed to find a solution that centralised signature management, without the cost of a third party application or more software for IT to support. After searching the internet, VB seemed like the best option. The full script can be downloaded here. Simply download the file and rename it to .vbs.

The script can be deployed as a login script with group policy and gives Administrators:

- Centralised Control over Events and Formatting
- Automated Job Title, Phone Number and Email Address Control
- Piece of mind that corporate image is being portrayed.