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Presence and contact lists in Lync / Skype for Business environments

Publishing presence information

Pexip Infinity automatically publishes basic presence information in Microsoft Lync and Skype for Business* environments for Pexip services (Virtual Meeting Rooms, Virtual Auditoriums and contacts reached via the Pexip Distributed Gateway). The contact will indicate that it is 'Available' when a Lync client subscribes to it.

Note that a Pexip Distributed Gateway contact publishes an 'Available' presence if the contact alias matches any Gateway Routing Rule. This does not necessarily mean that the destination alias that is associated with the rule is online and available.

The Gateway Routing Rule that allows Lync to dial out to other devices should be configured with a Destination alias regex match that matches your dial plan as precisely as possible. For example, if all of your endpoints have a dial plan in the format <city>-roomXXX@vc.example com where XXX is a number (e.g. london-room003@vc.example.com), then you should use a regex like [a-z]+-room\d\d\d@vc\.example\.com instead of just .+@vc.example.com. This will help identify invalid contact addresses in the Lync client contact list as they would not match the rule, have no presence, and hopefully alert the Lync user to a possible typing mistake.

See Regular expression (regex) reference for information about writing regular expressions.

* Note that where this documentation refers to "Lync", it represents both Microsoft Lync and Skype for Business unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Customizing the contact list avatar

You can customize the avatar that is displayed in Lync users' contact lists to represent the Pexip service.

The avatar that is displayed in the Lync user's contact list is the content of the presence_avatar_image.jpg file contained in the theme associated with the VMR. If no theme has been associated with the VMR, or it is a Pexip Distributed Gateway contact, then the avatar from the default theme is used. Note that this feature only works in environments where the Conferencing Nodes are directly reachable from the Lync client.

The contact list also displays the VMR name, its presence status and the VMR description.

For more information about how to customize a theme, see Customizing images and voice prompts using themes.