Contact Management, Presence, and Instant Messaging
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.
Office Communicator 2007 offers new features to give users greater control and flexibility over the way they manage their contacts and Contact List. Office Communicator 2007 also introduces new Presence states to more accurately reflect a person's ability and willingness to communicate. In addition, Office Communicator 2007 offers enhancements to instant messaging, including support for rich text format in instant messages. The following features are available with all configurations of Office Communications Server and Office Communicator 2007.
Contact Management
Contact management has been improved in Office Communicator 2007 to offer the following new features:
Distribution Groups. Now users can add any mail-enabled group that is in Active Directory to their contact list. They simply search for it and drag it into their Contact List. If users are enabled for conferencing, they can select distribution groups in their Contact list to start multi-party phone calls.
Most Recent Contacts. A Recent Contacts group is now available in the Communicator Contact List. The Recent Contacts list shows the ten contacts with which a user has most recently communicated using IM, phone, or video.
Drag and drop contacts into groups. Users can now drag contacts from the Search Results pane into their Contact List. They can also drag and drop contacts between groups in the Contact List. Note that users cannot drag contacts into a distribution group.
Drag and drop contacts from the Contact List to the Conversation window roster or vice versa. Users can drag contacts from the Contact List into the roster in the Conversation window during an IM session, audio or video call, or a conference. Users can also drag contacts from the roster in the Conversation window to their Contact List.
Drag and drop contacts from Outlook 2007. Office Outlook 2007 users can add contacts to the Communicator Contact List by dragging names from the To and CC fields of an Outlook message to the Communicator Contact List.
Improved User Interface for Contact Details. Users click a contacts Presence button in their Contact list and see a Contact Card that provides not only details about the person, but an actions menu with options for contacting the person.
Multi-select contacts. Users can now start IM, phone, or audio/video conferences by multi-selecting contacts in the Contact List and then selecting a communication mode such as Send an Instant Message or Start a Conference Call.
Presence and Presence Management
Office Communicator 2007 offers the following new presence and presence management features:
New presence states and presence buttons. Presence states are now more granular, including Inactive and Busy Inactive busy states. New presence buttons have been introduced to accurately reflect the presence state. Presence states now transition from Available, to Inactive, to Away. Intermediate Inactive states are determined by a user-configurable idle-time setting that monitors user activity on the computer.
Improved Presence Management. Office Communicator 2007 offers greater granularity for controlling access to a user's Presence information. Now users can assign contacts to Team or Personal access levels, to control, for example, who can see their Home and Mobile phone numbers.
Interruption Management. Users can now assign a Team access level to other users to create a preferential list of contacts who are allowed to communicate with them, even when their Presence status is set to Do Not Disturb. Users can manually set their Presence status to Do Not Disturb from the Presence menu or from incoming IM, Call, or Conference alerts. When a user's presence is set to Do Not Disturb, they see, by default, only urgent alerts from Team members.
Location setting configuration. Users can now set their location status from the Presence menu in the Communicator window status area. The user can select the Home or Office location, or enter a custom location. When a user sets the Location option, the users Location information becomes available on his or her Contact Card, and can be seen by those contacts that been Personal or Team access levels by the user.
Instant Messaging
Office Communicator 2007 has been enhanced to offer the following new Instant Messaging features:
Easy IM from Search. Users can search for a contact by name, and press ENTER if Communicator finds the right contact, to start an IM session. Pressing CTRL+ENTER starts a call to the contact.
Rich Text Formatting of IM Text. With Office Communicator 2007, users can format IM text and they can copy and paste rich text from Office documents such as Office Word and Excel.
IM conference from a distribution group, contact group, or multiple contacts. Users can now start an IM conference by right-clicking a distribution group, contact group, or multi-selected contacts, and then selecting the Send an Instant Message option from the contextual menu.