We realized, that after installing Live Messenger we do not see the Contact/System User icon anymore in our MS CRM system. 

Figure 1: Live Messenger

Instead we get this IM presence icon. In 99,9 % it is grey because no one has all the CRM contacts in his Messenger and therefore it is uninteresting for our users.

I now tried to find out how we can turn this off and it is not very easy to find information about this presence information.

There is one setting in CRM to turn this off/on for Grid Views.

Open the fullname and click on Change Column Properties and you will find the checkbox Enable presence for this column.

Figure 2: Change Column Properties

You are not able to turn this off/on for system views and you cannot modify it for lookup fields.

Because these configuration possibilities are very limited, I looked for another possibility to turn this off generally.

What I found out was that the “name.dll”, which comes with Office. So my solution to turn off the presence was to unregister the “name.dll”.

Figure 3: name.dll

At the moment, I do not see any drawbacks of this. I am also sure that if I will upgrade the Messenger or Office, it will register again. But for now this is the solution I use to get rid of this presence information.

I tested this only with Windows 7 and Office 2007.

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