How to enable “Appear Offline” presence status in office communicator?

This artcile talks about how can you enable your MOC 2007 to have the status "Appear Offline". Once you have this status, you can set yourself to appear offline while you are online.

By default presence status in your office communicator will look like as follow.

If you want to add more custom status, click here…

I followed this link to set following 4 different status in the office communicator.

There might be times when you want to login in office communicator but you don’t want to appear online. You would like to set the status as “appear offline” . Since you dont have this option by default in MOC 2007, you need to modify following group policy before you could get this option in MOC 2007.

The policy name is “Enable the state Appear Offline” in the group policy. You need to enable it and ensure that the policy gets applied. (You might want to run gpupdate /force after applying this change).

Note: You will get above group policy setting after importing Communicator.adm template in the group policy object.

You can enable “Appear offline” status in office communicator using registry editor as well.

You need to create following registry DWORD and set its value as 1 to enable it.

The DWORD name is EnableAppearOffline, type is REG_DWORD and location is

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator.

After making above change, exit from office communicator (from system tray) and relaunch it.

After signing back into Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, you should be able to see “Appear offline” status as follow.

And thats it!!!

Related Article:

How to set custom status in MOC 2007

How to be visible to defined contacts only

MOC 2007 Group Policies