Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

Pages Menu
TwitterRssFacebook

Posted by on Jun 20, 2019 in Microsoft Teams

Real Time Presence is coming to Microsoft Teams

Real Time Presence is coming to Microsoft Teams

Exciting news for long-time users of Microsoft Teams. A new item has just showed up on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap – “Microsoft Teams – Real Time Presence“:

You may think that Microsoft Teams already has presence, so what is this all about?  Well, since launch, Microsoft Teams has suffered from an issue where presence changes were not reflected automatically. For people that spend a lot of time coming on and off calls, or in and out of meetings, it could take up to 5 minutes for changes to presence to show. This would result in people thinking you were free when in fact you were on a call, or visa versa.

It’s been a real problem amoungst Teams users. A UserVoice item for this (raised by my Modality co-worker Graham Cropley) has 414 votes. Back in November, someone from the Teams Engineering team commented that a fix was being worked on, but we’ve not heard anything since then.

This is not entirely unexpected and I don’t really blame Microsoft for it. Teams is a web-based application which polls for data. However, presence changes need to be reflected more promptly than just waiting for the next poll request. It sounds like a fix is in the pipeline for this. My guess would be something like long-polling, or maybe an established abstraction like SignalR to use websockets when available, but fall back to other means if needed.

Regardless, with an expected release date of July 2019, we’ll find out soon.

As a developer, this is exciting news. Another very popular UserVoice item is the ability for a Presence API for Microsoft Teams. It had been worrying me that this API would suffer from the same timing issues as native presence, which would have greatly diminished its usefulness. Seeing that the presence lag is being sorted out first definitely feels like the right thing to do, and means that any future API will be able to be built on accurate data.

As someone who has had to deal with the problems of real-time messaging at scale, I understand how much work it must have been to fix this problem, so I think it’s right that we congratulate the Teams Engineering Team when this feature rolls out. It’s a change that many won’t notice, and those that do may shrug and say “well, it should have been like that from the start”, but developers will know the effort involved, and we say Thank You! 🙂

Written by Tom Morgan

Tom is a Microsoft Teams Platform developer and Microsoft MVP who has been blogging for over a decade. Find out more.
Buy the book: Building and Developing Apps & Bots for Microsoft Teams. Now available to purchase online with free updates.

Post a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Share to Microsoft Teams