Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Be Right Back

There are two things about me and presence… –
1.I feel _very_ strongly that it’s a cornerstone of UC (along with User Experience and a single address for a person).
2.I am the worst offender of fake presence. And really I don’t mean to…
The problem is that I want to set my status to away (or BRB) when I get up for a break / lunch whatever, but I am forgetful and I forget to reset it when I get back.
So I built an app that will set me presence to ‘Be Right Back’ when I hit the hot key (shift-caps lock or scroll lock). It then resets my presence when I return (and move the mouse or press any key).
As an aside, I thought it would be a good practice to build this as a real application and go through the now slightly less tedious Windows Platform certification process.
Its setting screen is fully integrated into the Lync UI’s main menu.
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And there is not much to this app (yet) :
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I’m releasing it here free for personal use, if you have a commercial use for it…. please get in touch.
Also if you have any ideas for improvements / feature requests, let me know that too.
I built this simple app using the Lync SDK – I cant wait for Lync to release next week so that I can share some code samples.
Updated 11/15/2010 : Version 1.0.2 now has a couple of bug fixes and better handling of the screen dimmer (not using the power management API as it only seemed to work on laptop screens). I also added Windows Live messenger status sync, for all states including BRB.

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