Keep sounds to a minimum when my status is Do Not Disturb

Sometimes silence is golden. Like when? Like, say, when your status has been set to Do Not Disturb, a status you probably set because, well, because you don’t want to be disturbed. With that in mind you might want to configure Lync so that no sounds are played while your status is set to Do Not Disturb; that way you won’t hear a beep or a boop every time something happens on the order of, say, one of your tagged contacts logging on or off.

One way to configure the Do Not Disturb setting is from within the Options dialog box; all you have to do is select (or deselect) the Keep sounds to a minimum when my status is Do Not Disturb checkbox:

You can also configure the Do Not Disturb setting by modifying the HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator\suspendSoundWhenDND registry value. Set this value to 1 to ensure that no sounds are played when your status is set to Do Not Disturb; set this value to 0 if it’s OK for Lync to play sounds while your status is set to Do Not Disturb.

Before we show you how to change that setting, let's show you how to retrieve the current value of suspendSoundWhenDND from the local computer. You say you'd rather retrieve this value from a remote computer? That's fine; just set the value of the variable $computer to the name of that remote computer. For example:

$computer = "atl-ws-001.litwareinc.com"

Here's how you get the current value:

$computer = "."

$registry = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey("CurrentUser", $computer)

$key = $registry.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator", $True)

$value =$key.GetValue("suspendSoundWhenDND",$null)

if ($value -eq 1) {$value = "Yes"}

if ($value -eq 0) {$value = "No"}

Write-Host "Keep sounds to a minimum when my status is Do Not Disturb: $value"

And now, at long last, here's a script that sets the value of suspendSoundWhenDND. In this example, the script suppresses the playing of sounds when your status is set to Do Not Disturb; that's done by setting suspendSoundWhenDND to 1. If you'd prefer to hear sounds even when your status is set to Do Not Disturb, well, hey, who are we to judge? In that case, just set suspendSoundWhenDND to 0:

$key.SetValue("suspendSoundWhenDND",0,"DWORD")

Like we were saying:

$computer = "."

$registry = [Microsoft.Win32.RegistryKey]::OpenRemoteBaseKey("CurrentUser", $computer)

$key = $registry.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator", $True)

$key.SetValue("suspendSoundWhenDND",1,"DWORD")