Custom Enhanced Presence Categories

Custom enhanced presence categories can be used to support application-specific presence features not yet supported by any existing enhanced presence schemas. For example, you want to expose the GPS coordinates with an address to indicate the device location of a user. You can define a custom category element to specify this location data as follows.

<GPSLocation latitude="47.640071" longitude="122.129598">
   <address>1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399, USA</address>
</GPSLocation>

Before you can publish this GPS location data as a category instance, you must register the category name, namely GPSLocation, with Microsoft Lync Server 2010. For information about registering a custom category name with the server, see Registering Custom Category Names.

For other applications to parse and render any custom category instances, you must document the custom category instance elements and share the information with other application developers. Otherwise, the custom presence data will be ignored by other applications.