Office Communicator

Office Communicator provides faculty and staff the ability to communicate and collaborate in real-time and supports instant messaging, peer-to-peer audio, video, application-sharing, and data collaboration while keeping all information encrypted.

Office Communicator 2007 is currently available for faculty and staff only.

What is Office Communicator?

This Microsoft program is for Instant Messaging (IM) or chatting online. It provides faculty and staff the ability to informally communicate and collaborate in real-time with team members when they are spread across the world, or even across campus. It ties in seamlessly with Outlook, for example during appointments on your calendar, it will change your status to “Busy”.

By default, Communicator will automatically start when you log on to Windows, and this icon is visible on the right hand side of the taskbar. The icon changes as it notifies you of new voice mails. A notification pops up when a contact sends you an instant message, and you can receive or decline the invitation. You can invite additional contacts to join a multi-party conversation and you can send an attachment with a message or copy and paste text in rich text format.

Presence and IM (Quick Reference Card PDF)

Contacts

Manage your Contacts in Communicator. You can view Recent Contacts, and can drag and drop contacts from Outlook into Communicator. Create a new group of Contacts to organize them. Communicate with your contacts by sending and receiving instant messages.

Presence

Presence has an important role to play in unified communications. It allows a user to know beforehand about the availability of the remote user to communicate via a given mode. Presence is a mix of availability and willingness. Presence automatically carries information about a user's current meeting title and calendar location.
- Customize and control access to your Presence information: make a selection to change your status.
- Click a contact’s Presence button to view options for contacting them.

Share Your Desktop

If you choose to, by clicking Share and Share Desktop, you can share your desktop with a participant in an Instant Message:

Share documents
Share applications
Share control of your desktop, so that the person can control the mouse and keyboard. For example you may choose to share your desktop with a technology support technician.