The Office Communicator client offers much more than just IM – it is a rich application that offers conferencing, voice, and desk sharing among other features. For business users in the Financial Services space, these features can be very useful. However, chat (IM and topic-based) is the most important medium of collaboration for these user communities. Given that Group Chat is available on a client that’s different from Communicator, organizations will have to roll out two separate clients to users to offer the whole gamut of communication features.

When talking to MindAlign customers, a question we hear quite often is whether users have a choice about how they use these clients. When a user has both clients installed, by default, IM is not available on the Group Chat client. So a valid concern is the impact to productivity as users switch between the two clients for IM and Group Chat. One option for organizations is to roll out only the Group Chat client. IM is then available on this client, and users can maintain their contact/buddy list at one place. The fact is that users are likely to be using IM and Group Chat a majority of the time, so this might be a safe choice.

But users would definitely like access to conferencing, voice and other communication features – these are what have the potential to increase business productivity and provide return on investment from the new platform. So does this mean that business users will be stuck switching between two chat clients on a day-to-day basis? Fortunately, no. Microsoft allows users to decide on the end point for IM with a simple registry setting.

Here are the steps to enable IM in Group Chat when you have both clients installed (when you only have Group Chat, you don’t have anything to worry about – you can use IM within Group Chat by default):

1. Add an entry, DisableIM under KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\GroupChatConsole\Permissions. This should be of type DWORD -  make sure the value is set to 0

2. Restart Group Chat – on logging in, you should see your buddy list and be able to initiate a private conversation.

3. If you are logged into Group Chat only, and someone sends you an IM, a new Group Chat window is launched. If you are logged into both clients, then both clients are notified. The client you pick first will handle the conversation. A different IM conversation can be initiated from either client.

4.  If you’d like to restrict IM to Group Chat alone, then you can disable IM on Communicator. You can use the registry entry DisableIM type DWORD = 1 under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator - You can continue to use Voice, Conferencing and other features on Communicator.

Sweta Jagirdar Unified Communications Microsoft Group Chat, Microsoft Office Communicator, OCS