How to turn on Outlook toast notifications even if a Contact Expert agent is in conversation with a customer

A Contact Expert agent's Microsoft presence status is CE - Conversation during a customer conversation managed by the Contact Expert Agent application (including voice call, email or chat sessions). This presence status is presented as a Do Not Disturb (DND) state for all the rest of the SfB users. A DND status also means all the 'toast' notifications are disabled in the Microsoft Office software suite components due to the presence status integration between Skype for Business client and for example Outlook.

This might cause difficulties for some agents if they should be notified about incoming emails sent to their corporate mailbox directly during a CE conversation, and that is because the SfB client prevents Outlook from showing toast notifications while DND is in effect.

The below guide describes how to change this behaviour and enable Outlook toast notifications even during DND.

Note

The following steps will defeat the SfB/Outlook presence status integration. This means the presence status of the agent's SfB contacts will not show up in Outlook, and the agent's SfB presence will not be set automatically based on his or her Outlook calendar.

The following steps require administrator level user login permissions and IT skills.

Step-by-step guide

1. Open the Registry Editor on the agent workstation.

2. Find the following registry key:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\X.0\Common\
   

   Where X is 15 for Office 2013 and 16 for Office 2016, etc.

3. If it does not exist, add the following sub-key: IM.

4. Select the following key in the tree:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\X.0\Common\IM\
   

5. Add a new DWORD value to the IM key:

   Value Name: TurnOffPresenceIntegration
   Value Data: 1
   

6. Restart Outlook.