Managing Contacts
Most people are accustomed to the behaviors
in Outlook, where you can quickly look up a user in the contacts or
find the user by starting to type that person’s name. The Lync 2013
client follows this model by organizing contacts by groups and by
enabling users to quickly search for contacts by simply typing the
person’s name.
For example, on the Find Someone or a Room,
or Dial a Number line, if you type a name, the client suggests names
based on the contacts. From here, right-click on the contact, select
Add to Contacts List, and select a group for the user. When this
occurs, the person you added receives a notification of the addition
and has the option to add you as well. After being added, the contacts
appear in the group you selected and you are able to see their presence
information at any time.
Note
The Lync 2013 client downloads the address
book on a random interval after the first sign-in. It might take up to
an hour before corporate search results appear. Creating a DWORD called
GalDownloadInitialDelay with a value of 0 in the Windows registry at
HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync will force the
address book to download immediately.
After a contact is added, you can
move the contact from one contact group to another by simply
left-clicking and dragging the contact from one group to another. You
can also right-click and select Move to another group.
Managing Groups
The Lync 2013 client enables users to
organize their contacts by placing them inside groups. The first tab in
the Lync 2013 defaults to a view where contacts are organized by
groups. By default, these are the groups:
• Favorites
• All Contacts
The Favorites group is automatically
populated by the client based on how often particular contacts are
used, or the user can manually pin certain contacts to the group. The
All Contacts group becomes the Other Contacts group as soon as a user
creates the first custom group. Groups can be deleted or renamed by way
of the right-click function.
Note
Contacts can exist within multiple groups at
a time. Right-click on any contact and select Copy Contact To in order
to create a duplicate contact entry within another group.
A convenient use of groups is to organize
members of a project or department. By right-clicking the group name,
you can choose to launch a conference call that invites all members of
that group. You can achieve similar functionality by selecting multiple
contacts by Ctrl-clicking them and then right-clicking to choose Start
a Conference Call. This call can use Lync’s PC-to-PC call features or
the PSTN/PBX gateway.
You can organize groups within the
client either by using the right-click-accessed Move Group Up and Move
Group Down functions or by simply dragging them from one position to
another. Right-click on any existing group and select Create New Group
to manually build a new group.
Status View
The default view of the contact list is to
organize the user’s contacts by groups, but users can also sort based
on the current status of each contact. In this view, their group membership is irrelevant and only their current status affects where their contact appears. Statuses include these:
• Online
• Away
• Unknown
• Unavailable
The status view is a quick and easy way to determine which of your contacts are available at any time.
