I was ‘confused’ at first because I was already thinking of the In/Out-of-Office indicator that shows if someone is present in the office or not. What you are refering to is the Activity indicator. The Activity Indicator can IMHO be removed if OCS is enabled, the Presence Indicator that shows In/Out-of-Office should remain available.

Reason for this is that the Activity Indicator and OCS represent quite the same thing, but the Presence Indicator and OCS are 2 different things. The current Presence Indicator gives insight if someone is in or out-of-office. Being available online does not tell anything about the location. Depending on the case, one of them is used. For example, if I need some feedback from one of my developers, I’d look for the online availability. If I need a consultant to install something on a local PC, I’d look for one who is actually in the building.

Still, the OSC Indicator makes it easy to communicate directly to the resource, making it quite easy to ask if he/she is available.

Cheers,

Andre

Integrating with microsoft platforms is a wish I have for quite a long time, this would be great.

What I am interested in is the way this system will present the presence, microsoft has implemented this with integration of your outlook calender. In Synergy we also have appointments and in workflow definition we can define whether or not a person is available during this appointment, so I would suggest to adopt this method.

The user should be able to modify this status because, as we all know, appointments do not allways represent the reality.

Next question is whether or not a user needs Microsoft OCS R2 installed to be able to use or is Exact going to integrate some software with which IM is possible without having to implement Microsoft OCS / LM.

I think building in an engine which does not need the OCS client would very mutch help in adopting this technology in Exact’s market, allthough if the customer has implemented OCS this would be the engine to run this functionality.

Great functionality, next thing is similar calender functionality as in outlook with the advantage of adding meta data and workflow as we know in synergy which would be great!!

Compliments on this product blog, it finally gives an insight in de development project Exact is working on.