Managing your Presence - It's a tool!

How you manage your presence state is important if you want it to be a help, not a hinderance.


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What feels like a long, long time ago I wrote an entry about how people can and should manage their presence - you can see it here:

The Etiquette of Presence

Presence isn't that unusual any more - people are use to it.... that's not to say people are always using it in the best way however.

I still see people who the first thing they do when they get in or online is put their Status on busy. So much so you ignore the busy - you IM anyway, are you really busy or just on busy? Hello?

Of course their response or lack of it tells me whether the busy is real or not...but that's not very good is it? I may as well just ignore their presence and call whenever I want. What's the point of that?

In addition to that it's obvious to me that some people bang up the times on their inactive and away settings:

2014-11-03Presence

They set them so that even when they wander off from the their PC for ages they're still showing as available. Again, what is the point of that? Trying to IM someone when available only to see them rock in from the sandwich/coffee shop chatting away can be a little frustrating.

Why do people do that? Why want to appear to be available when you're not? My guess is it's down the fear of the 'Big Brother' as in oh my, if I'm away for ages people will assume I'm lounging around watching Homes under Hammer.

The reality of course is that few people do view this in such a way.

You can also do custom presence states with Lync too - for example I have a few extra on my presence options:

2014-11-03Presence

You can see I’ve got a few extra states at the bottom - all designed to help people understand the best way to contact me.

Mobile clients are also now massively on the rise. Personally for example I tend to leave my Lync client on my phone running all the time - I may logout at the weekends totally, but that's only if I remember. I'm OK with that - I would get why a lot of people wouldn't be of course.

Presence is a great tool if managed and used properly. Constantly on busy - people will ignore it. Constantly available but not, people will ignore it - and get frustrated with you in the process.


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