Office Communications Server (OCS) has the ability to connect your users with PIC (Public IM Connectivity) users. Properly configured, you can connect to Microsoft Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). However, the connection between OCS and the consumer products is not tightly integrated (although Microsoft Live Messenger, obviously, does this better than the other two), and your users may inquire as to how much of the enhanced presence that we find so valuable makes it through the translation to the public IM providers.
What follows is a demonstration of Office Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 Enhanced Presence as seen by these three popular consumer chat programs:
None of the nifty OCS enhanced presence niceties such calendar busy or Active Directory information shows up in these three IM programs, so all we get is the jelly bean to see color of presence or the text of presence. One nice thing is that the Yahoo! contact, the Live Messenger contact, and the AIM contact are able to be set to “team” and still make contact even though my OC was set to DND.
Here’s the big table of OC status as seen by each of the other three.
| | OC Available | OC Busy | OC Do not disturb | OC Be right back | OC Away |
| Yahoo! (9.0.0.124) | Available | Busy | Busy | Stepped out | Stepped out |
| Windows Live Messenger (14.0.8064.206) | 
Check out the zippy icon in Live Messenger! And it stays there and changes color. Slick. | Color change to red, same icon | Color change to red, same icon | Color change to yellow | Color change to yellow |
| AOL (6.9.1.3.4) | 
AOL gives you a zippy icon too. Available | Away | Away | Away | Away |
Notice that OC will show Yahoo status, to include the little quote/status message thingy. Yahoo has three presence states: available, busy, and invisible. OC shows the entire user name, while also showing a Y!
I find it odd that you can set the Yahoo! client to only three states, yet it still reports the OC user as “stepped out” which makes a fourth state; a state that the Yahoo! user cannot set. Yahoo! Messenger has little dinky icons for showing presence, so a graphic just wasn’t doable.
Here are the Yahoo! Presence states shown in OC.
| | Yahoo Available | Yahoo Busy | Yahoo Invisible |
| OC 2007 R2 | Available | Busy | Offline |
OC will show Live Messenger status. The global status spot is occupied by the Live Messenger characters.
Here are the Live Messenger states shown in OC. Note that there are four of them versus three in Yahoo!
| | Live Messenger Available | Live Messenger Busy | Live Messenger Away | Live Messenger Appear offline |
| OC 2007 R2 | Available | Busy | Away | Offline |
AIM is another story. From the first table, we see that AIM only has two possible states for the OC user: Available or away.
Here are the AIM messenger states as shown in OC.
| | AIM Available | AIM Invisible |
| OC 2007 R2 | Available | Offline |
In the active chat window, AIM changes the color of the presence notification (as shown) and AIM does identify the OC user with a nice icon:
AIM’s main screen shows this for available:
And this little icon shows up for all other presence states:
OC will show AIM presence, and gives the AIM/AOL user the “running man” icon:
I hope you enjoyed our trip through the various PIC presence scenarios. If you want more information on enhanced presence, take a look at this webpage.