Jennifer Ann Mason

One of the great features of Office 365 is the ability to easily and quickly work with a team across different applications. While SharePoint is the most convenient place to store and share documents, sometimes you still need to send an email and sometimes you just need to chat with someone. With Lync integration all of these tasks are very easy! You should notice that wherever you have a person column in SharePoint you can see a user’s presence indicator. This indicator is really just the user’s current online status from link:

You will notice from the screenshot above that my status is displayed as a small green icon. But did you also know that you can hover over my name and see additional options for quickly contacting me, along with my current status message from Lync?

Since this is connected with Lync, it means that if I am busy in Lync, I will show as busy in SharePoint:

From the menu you can email, start a chat or even call directly using the Lync client. As an example, when you click the link to start a chat, the Lync window will be displayed and I can immediately start my conversation.

But there is still more- Maybe you don’t really need to talk to someone immediately, but instead need to schedule a future meeting with them. This is easy with the presence integration. If you select the more option you will be able to access these extra options:

Selecting the option to Schedule a Meeting will open my calendar in Outlook and show a meeting request:

Remember, these features are available wherever the person field is used within SharePoint. This means that you have a way to quickly access your team members and quickly start to communicate with them. Here are some simple examples for you of how you could use this within your environment:

• If you have a quick question about a task list, you can easily start a chat with the person the task has been assigned to.
  
• If you are working on a wiki page and have a question you can share your screen with another user and show them the content you are working on.
  
• If you have a discussion that needs additional information you can quickly access another user’s calendar and schedule a discussion.
  

These features can often be overlooked, so be sure to add this to your training plan. You want to get the most out of Office 365, so be sure you show your users how easy it can be to quickly work together.