What Happens When You Don”t Change Your OCS Presence Status
Filed under: Instant Messaging (IM), OCS 2007, OCS 2007 R2, Unified Communications
Let’’s talk about OCS Presence for a moment. Specifically, what happens in the minds of others when you leave yours the same for days on end.
Do You Do This?
If your office use OCS at all, you know someone like this. You never know what Bill or Mary is doing–because they haven”t changed their Presence status in days. They”ve been “Updating the server” or “Meeting with Joe.”
Since last week? Really?
Presence is there for a reason. It makes others aware of what you”re doing. Just like IM. Are you here, available to talk? Away, not at your desk? Busy on a project, so please don”t disturb?
These are things co-workers need to know. And it frustrates the heck out of them when they can”t tell.
Why They Do It
Now the reason people don”t change their Presence status is simple. They”re lazy.
No, it’’s not “I just don”t have time” or “It’’s new, so I forget about it.” Those are excuses. They”re lazy and don”t value what help Presence does bring them.
It takes what, five seconds to update Presence? Nobody is so busy they can”t spare five seconds. (And if they think they are, they need to offload some duties.)
It’’s Poor Communication - Why Presence is Something to Remember
There’’s a very good reason why those five seconds matter. If you”re not updating your Presence status while working, it casts a bad shadow on you in the minds of others.
Little things like this can make people lose trust in your effectiveness. “He/she can”t be bothered to let us know what they”re doing? Are they not working at all? Or maybe hiding something?”
That’’s the kind of thought process this starts. With stale Presence status, your productivity can be called into question. If nobody knows what you”re doing, how can you prove you”re doing anything?
Something else to consider: If management monitors employee productivity (and there’’s no reason why they shouldn”t, if they do use OCS), then a days-old Presence will make them wonder. What are you up to? Anything?
Now you see where this can become a problem.
Loss of (Your) Value - What Happens as a Result
Without others able to determine what you”re doing, your value as an employee could drop. (I”m not saying this will happen. But it could.)
Why? Because people will stop relying on you. They”ll assume you”re not available for whatever reason and go about their business. They stop seeing you as a person who can help them do their job. That becomes a real problem for you. Fast.
And if management makes the same assumption? That you can”t keep “the rest of us” in the loop, so you could be screwing around not doing work? Well…
An Easy Way to Remember to Update
Like I said before - five seconds. And here’’s an easy way to remember.
Plan to update Presence before & after lunch. This way you put Presence in your thoughts related to lunch. (You”ll remember lunch, right?) Associating Presence with another idea like this makes it easier to recall afterward. A little memory trick courtesy of modern psychology.
OCS Presence status should be updated every day. Five seconds. Keep it up, and retain the impression of a reliable, productive worker in the minds of others.
The OCS Insider will go on holiday from today until January 1st. Join us again after that for more exploration of OCS 2007 - and the upcoming OCS 2010. Happy Holidays!
More Companies Joining the VoIP/Unified Communications Market: Is This Good for OCS Users?
Filed under: Instant Messaging (IM), OCS 2007, Unified Communications, Voice over IP
I received two interesting articles in this morning’’s Google Alerts for “Unified Communications.” (Got to stay informed!) What was interesting was that both articles discussed UC services others than Microsoft’’s. Both represent different ways to introduce the Unified Communications idea to businesses.
Both could also pose a problem to the whole Unified Communications/VoIP market.
The first article is: Skype Taps ShoreTel for Skype-to-SIP UC
Skype for SIP allows businesses to receive incoming calls from Skype users via SIP-enabled UC systems. ShoreTel customers can also make outgoing calls from their ShoreTel UC systems to other phones at Skype rates (very cheap).
The second is: Avaya Positioned in “Leader Quadrant” for Unified Communications by Gartner Inc.
Avaya’’s Aura is a UC package that interoperates with legacy communication systems like PBX. Much like OCS, it offers presence, IM, and SIP-based calling. It even works with Microsoft Office Communicator if you like.
What’’s Good About These Offerings
First off, it’’s competition in the Unified Communications market. Competition (even indirect competition) helps spur product improvement. Business users get better pricing, and more options.
Second, Skype for SIP makes for an interesting bridge between corporate Unified Communications and Skype. Skype, while mostly a consumer-level service, is popular for cheap international calls. This new offering could provide businesses a cheap-and-easy way to make those calls from now on.
What Problems These Offerings Could Cause
The UC market will get more confusing. With more and more UC services (some picking & choosing what they”ll offer) customers are left unsure of what they”ll get. That uncertainty will carry over onto other products, like OCS. When you don”t know if you”ll get what you need, you tend not to try.
Issues of security and scale crop up too. I”m sure Skype will take every precaution they can to protect business communications through their network. But the fact that Skype originated in the consumer arena (and most of its users are still consumers) will call their security effectiveness into question.
The consumer base raises questions about the very future of Skype, in fact. Will Skype make a further push into the business arena than this? Or is it just an add-on to nab business users? The latter may be true, according to comments on the topic. SkypeJournal.com actually decried the new Skype-to-SIP offering as “abandoning Skype’’s central tenets”!
So, IS This Good for OCS?
Actually, I think so. There’’s some competition (mostly from Avaya), but that can improve things for everyone. OCS 2007 also presents a very unified Unified Communications solution (if you”ll pardon my repetition there).
The best products aren”t necessarily the ones who are there first. They”re the products who are there to last. And with OCS 2010 on the horizon, this one’’s sticking around.
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Quick Tips on Easier Ways to Use OCS 2007
Filed under: Instant Messaging (IM), OCS 2007, OCS 2007 R2, Reference
We”ve been using OCS for a while now. When you use a system day in/day out, you begin to pick up a few tricks. Ways to make chatting easier, taking advantage of lesser-known features, that sort of thing. Some questions along the same lines have come in from our OCS clients too. So I collected a few for today’’s OCS Insider post.
When you”re done with a conversation, leave the window open for a moment. This gives OCS a chance to realize you”re through, so it can record the conversation in Conversation History. You”ll see a notice when it’’s done so like this:
----------
This conversation is being saved in the Conversation History
folder in your Outlook mailbox.
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When in a conference call or chatting on IM, you may need to pass a link to someone. If you put an underscore ( _ ) in front of the link URL, OCS will not activate the link. Much easier to copy this way.
If for some reason you want to “appear offline” in Office Communicator…long lunch anyone?…I have some bad news. It IS possible to appear offline. But it’’s not enabled by default.
You should really use Away for anytime you”re not at the keyboard. Or Do Not Disturb if you can”t have anyone bugging you. But, if you absolutely HAVE to get out, this is how you enable Appear Offline (warning: this involves editing the registry).
- Log on to a computer running Communicator Web Access as a member of the local Administrators group.
- Click Start / Run.
- Type regedit in the Run dialog box. Hit ENTER.
- In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expand Software, expand Policies, expand Microsoft, click Communicator, and then do one of the following:
- If the Policy key already exists, go to step 6.
- If the Policy key doesn”t exist, right-click Communicator, point to New, and then click Key.
- After the new registry key is created, type Policy to rename the key.
- Right-click the new Policy registry key, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value.
- After the new value is created, type EnableAppearOffline to rename the value.
- Double-click the new EnableAppearOffline registry value.
- In the Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog box, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
(Instructions courtesy of Enabling Users to Appear Offline, Microsoft TechNet)
If you haven”t changed your Presence status message in more than 24 hours, do so at once. Leaving your status message unchanged for days means people don”t know what you”re doing. So they”ll often assume you”re available anyway, and bug you about their stuff.
Remember, the default status is Available. Unless you illustrate that you”re not, people will act like you are.
That’’s it for now. We”ve got more though; you”ll see them soon.
Have you found a useful tip while using OCS? If so, please list it in the Comments.
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Australian Credit Union (with 155K Members) Deploys a Unified Communications Call Center
I find the reasons for this credit union’’s UC deployment really interesting:
Teachers Credit Union Mitigates Risk with New UC Call Centre Deployment - CIO Magazine AU
Notice that Colin Thomas, the IT manager, talks a lot about mitigating risk/disaster recovery. Secondary servers in place, failover branch gateways, Web authentication…they”re using Unified Communications to not only to communicate with their membership. But to plan against problems too.
It’’s not hard to see why. They have a membership of 155,000 people! I”d want backups in place too, just in case anything went wrong.
I bring this up here because I like the seriousness with which this credit union approached Unified Communications. OCS 2007 had some early stability issues, which have been since corrected. However, first impressions carry…and the ”unreliable” keyword got stuck onto the application.
This is one example that shows OCS, and the Unified Communications platform it exemplifies, can be relied upon. Yes, they”ve added in backups. Any prudent IT manager should for their important systems. This obviously qualifies.
Mr. Thomas was even thorough enough in his quotes to give some basic examples of backup procedures to use. If you”re curious about ways to build failovers into an OCS-based communications system, there’’s some tips in the article.
OCS Components: Presence
Filed under: Instant Messaging (IM), OCS 2007, OCS 2007 R2
Next up in our OCS Components series is Presence. This is one of those little functions few people even think about — but they love having it around.
Presence is a real-time status indicator in your OCS client, Office Communicator. (That’’s a fancy way of saying it displays your “current status” to everyone else. ) If you”ve ever used IM, you know that means you pick from a few standard options. Away, Available, Busy, etc.
The Presence controls, at the top of Office Communicator. Currently, I”m Available and have no note set.
The available Presence options in Office Communicator are:
- Available
- Busy
- Do Not Disturb
- Be Right Back
- Away
To see them, click the green button. Ta daa!
The Status options for Presence.
To the right, you”ll see ”Type a note”. That’’s the Note field. This is where you write a small note to indicate what you”re doing.
Clearly, I”m succeeding.
So what’’s this good for?
Presence tells you when you should (and should not) try to communicate with someone. Conversely, it also tells them when they should (and should not) try to communicate with you.
Think about it. Let’’s say you needed a little input to finish that customer quote. So you emailed a co-worker…and you waited. And got coffee. And waited. And stared out the window. And waited some more.
You didn”t follow up right away because you didn”t want to nag. You don”t want the stigma of constantly nagging everyone in the office, right?
With co-workers using Presence, you don”t have to. You just check what they”re doing. If they”re Available, send an email or IM them. If they”re Busy or set to Do Not Disturb, don”t. If they”re Away (depending on their note), try calling.
It works in reverse too, right?
Of course! Set your Presence status to Busy or Do Not Disturb whenever you have things to do. Then write a brief Note so everyone understands. Use it whenever you”re busy. For example, when you”re:
- Solving a customer problem
- Wrestling with the Paperdemon
- Concentrating on budget issues
- Attending a client meeting
- Avoiding Susan in Accounting
(Don”t write that last one in the Note field though.)
Your current status is only a little bit of information. But it affects who/when someone communicates with you, and vice versa. I find the biggest value in Presence is simply knowing when not to bug a co-worker. Now, if I could just get them to do the same…
