Instant Messaging, Presence, and Contacts

Presence is the ability to detect another user’s availability. Using Lync Online, users can display their presence status—for example, Available, Away, Do Not Disturb, or Offline—to let others know their availability. Lync Online presence information is presented throughout the Office 365 suite, such as in SkyDrive Pro, which shows the status of the person who last edited a document. Users can instantly find and communicate with people from within Microsoft Outlook. This connection occurs wherever the user sees a colored presence indicator that represents a person’s presence status. The user can then click the presence icon and initiate a communication by using Lync and the interactive Office contact card. This feature is called “click-to-communicate.”

When Outlook calendar integration is enabled, a user can check another user’s schedule and get up-to-date availability information directly from that person’s calendar. This makes it easy to determine when someone will be available.

Instant messaging (IM) is the ability to transfer text messages in real time over an Internet Protocol (IP) network such as the Internet or an organization's corporate network. Instant messaging is available for both Lync-to-Lync and multiparty communication. IM text is encrypted for enhanced security.

Customers can configure how their own Lync contact card appears to other people.

Customers can control whether users can display their picture in the Lync contact card. If picture display is enabled, users can also change their picture from the default picture that is stored in the directory service. With Lync 2013 for Office 365 client and Exchange 2013, users’ replacement pictures can be of any fidelity, including high-definition (HD), and of any size. Exchange will adjust the file size and image dimensions to make it suitable for the contact picture. If there is no Exchange connectivity, the user’s Active Directory picture will display.

Customers can create a persistent list of contacts for all Lync Online users, ensuring that the contact information a user requires is immediately available. To help monitor the presence information of another user, users can add other users to their Contacts list, and can organize and group these contacts in different ways (by department, for example). Users can also search their company’s address book to find other users—which means it is not necessary to add someone to the Contacts list to detect presence or send an instant message.

Individual users can have a maximum of 250 presence subscribers or contacts in their Contacts list. A presence subscriber is a user who can see the published availability of another user, and receives updates as this availability changes. Presence subscribers that are added after the 250-contact limit is reached can still send and receive instant messages to the user and add the user to a Contacts list, but they cannot see any presence information (presence is shown as Presence Unknown).

Important:
Users can add up to 250 contacts to their Lync Contacts list. Presence subscribers that are added after the 250-contact limit is reached can still send and receive instant messages to the user and add the user to a Contacts list, but they cannot see any presence information (presence is shown as Presence Unknown).

Unified contact store is a feature that provides a consistent contact experience across Microsoft Office 365 products. This feature enables users to store all contact information in Exchange Online so that the information is available globally across Lync Online, Exchange Online, Outlook, and Outlook Web Access.

Using Lync, service users can search the address book for other users in their organization. They can also add email addresses and distribution lists to their Contacts lists. Instant messages can be sent to individual members of a distribution list or the entire distribution list. Distribution lists can be expanded to see the individual members.

Important:

Distribution list expansion is allowed only for distribution lists with 100 or fewer individual members (regardless of the members’ presence or sign-in status). Distribution lists with more than 100 members are allowed, but these distribution lists cannot be expanded to display individual list members. A distribution list counts as one contact against the 250-contact limit per user, regardless of the number of individual members in the distribution list. Address book synchronization between Lync Server on-premises and Lync Online is not supported.

Not available to Lync Online customers. For customers with an on-premises deployment of Lync Server 2013, Persistent Chat lets you participate in multiparty, topic-based conversations that persist over time. In Lync Server 2013, Persistent Chat functionality is integrated into the Lync 2013 client. As a result, users have access to Instant Messaging/Presence, Audio/Video, Conferencing, and Persistent Chat all in the Lync 2013 client. For more information about the Lync 2013 client, see Lync 2013 Help.

With enhanced presence privacy mode, users can restrict their presence information so that it is visible only to the contacts listed in their Lync Contacts list. When enabled, the option to restrict presence information to contacts becomes available in the Lync status options. When disabled, users can choose either to always let everyone see their presence information, or to adhere to any future changes the administrator makes to the privacy mode.

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