Manually enable Appear Offline in Lync 2013 (or Skype for Business 2016) 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 Policy 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:

Office 2013

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

Office 2016

Reg Add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\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, expand Microsoft, 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.