Presence information in the Mavention Apps on Office 365
We recently released new version of the Mavention Anniversaries and the Mavention Birthdays Apps. In this version we aimed to support Lync Presence integration to help your users reach out to their colleagues. As Lync integration is pretty solid in Office 365 it is a great way to connect different products.
However we did get some questions regarding the presence information. As it turns out some users of the apps didn’t see the presence information, and their users appeared offline. As pointed out by Cas van Iersel in SharePoint hosted Apps: Show a Users Presence. You are required to add the app domain in the trusted sites. Without adding the app domain being trusted the presence information will not be ‘updated’ and all users will be offline.
Depending on the environment you are running the app you have some options. Within Office 365 you could either try and find the app instance ending up with something like
This option will only trust the specific app, meaning that you will have to do this for every single app. In addition you can make it a bit easier on yourself (and your users) by using wildcards
This will trust all apps that run on your tenant, assuming you know the tenant name. And the final option you have is to use a wildcard for the domain, meaning you trust everything that comes from sharepoint.com
Now since I do trust sharepoint.com domain and have a lot of different tenants, the last option suits my needs. However if you are in an environment where users usually just visit a single tenant you can consider using the second option.
If you do not see any presence icon at all make sure to update to the latest version of the app. You can find the Mavention Anniversaries in the Office Store as well as you can find the Mavention Birthdays in the Office Store, or checkout all Apps by Mavention.