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.

And there is not much to this app (yet) :



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.