Outlook can show presence status in the “From” field next to the sender name. It would be a great help to integrate with this feature in Outlook so that one can directly send an IM when reading an email.
Additionally, I don’‘t understand why the previous Outlook plugin request was rejected: automatically publish that someone is in a meeting has been a great asset in Office Communicator. It doesn’‘t tell what meeting the person is in, just the fact that a meeting is taking place at the moment according to his/her calender. Even the Outlook/Communicator combination offers the user an option to electively publish the meeting status from his/her calender, why there’'s still a privacy concern?
Office Communicator even sets the person’‘s status message = Out-of-office message, so that if someone is indeed out of the office, I don’'t have to send an email and wait for the auto-reply to find out about alternative contacts…
Thanks.
- alex
Message was edited by: quartzite