Manually enable Appear Offline in Lync 2013 Preview via Registry

refer to http://www.shudnow.net/2012/09/18/manually-enable-appear-offline-in-lync-2013-preview-via-registry/

Lync 2013, just as with previous releases, allows the ability to Appear Offline. And just as with previous releases, you can enable this functionality in the Lync Client Policies. For information on how Lync Client Policies work, see my post here.  To enable Appear Offline through Client Policie against the Global Policy, use the following command:

Get-CSClientPolicy | Set-CSClientPolicy -EnableAppearOffline $true

This will require a Lync 2013 client restart.

As an Administrator, you may not want to make this change to a Client Policy as the goal of Lync is to promote collaboration, not inhibit it by having users Appear Offline and hide from other users.  At the same time, you may want to enable it for a user or two at request and won’t want to have to bother providing this small group of users their own Client Policy.  Lync 2010 provided the ability to do that via registry key.  Mike Pfeiffer provides a great article on Lync 2010 for setting the Lync 2010 registry key to manually enable Appear Offline in Lync 2010.  You can see his article here.

The goal of this article is to show how to do the same in Lync 2013.  Because Lync 2013 is now a part of Office 2013, Lync 2013 registry items are now under the Office 2013 registry section (Office 15.0).  There are two ways to set this registry:

1. Cmd.exe
2. Regedit.exe

Using Cmd.exe

The type the following command:

Reg Add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync" /V "EnableAppearOffline" /D 1 /T REG_DWORD /F

Using Regedit.exe

1. Start regedit.exe
2. In Registry Editor, expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, expand Software, expand Policies, expandMicrosoft, expand Office, expand 15.0, expand Lync
3. Right-click the Lync registry key, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value
4. After the new value is created, type EnableAppearOffline to rename the value.
5. Double-click the new EnableAppearOffline registry value.
6. After the new value is created, type EnableAppearOffline to rename the value.
7. Double-click the new EnableAppearOffline registry value.
8. In the Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog box, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.

Bug in Lync 2013 Preview

At the current time of this writing, the latest version of Lync 2013 is Lync 2013 Preview.  In the current Lync 2013 Preview, there is currently a bug that prevents the Appear Offline option from being displayed in the Presence drop down selection.

The workaround until this issue is fixed is that you can set Appear Offline in the taskbar by hovering over the Lync 2013 Preview icon and choosing the Appear Offline option there.