A little while ago people kept saying to me “I still can’t see your presence”. For some reason my Teams online presence was not showing for people outside my organisation, no matter how many time I reset it, whilst it was still visible to my colleagues. I then did a bit of testing and discovered that no user in my tenant was sharing their presence externally.
After much head scratching and research I came across this article Terence Luk: Enabling privacy mode for Microsoft Teams to hide presence information for external federated contacts.
To find out if this was the cause of my problem (and indeed if those Skype commands were still available), I used Get-CSPrivacyConfiguration to obtain the privacy settings in my tenant.
And there was the issue. The Privacy Mode was enabled, which Terence’s article indicated would block presence for external users when we were communicating in Teams.
Now to verify if setting it to False (turning off Privacy Mode) made the presence of users in my tenant reappear for our external partners.
Using the Set-CSPrivacyConfiguration -EnablePrivacyMode $false command I changed the settings and checked this had taken effect using the Get-CSPrivacyConfiguration again.
Then a bit more testing was in order, however before I could up pops the message: “You fixed it, I can see if you are online now”. Success!
But now I always need to remember to change my presence. I can highly recommend using the Duration setting to change your presence manually for a fixed period so you do not forget to set it back either
The other finding from this is that enabling Privacy mode does hide presence from external contacts as per Terence’s article
The Teams Queen Blog 