Sharepoint Online Presence and Contact Cards

Question

We are using O365/Sharepoint Online 2013 Plan 1 and I've been wondering that do we really need Lync to use the presence feature in Sharepoint (Newsfeed, comments, mysite etc.) or is there a way to enable presence without the use of Lync? I found these two former questions about presence but they didn't really have as clear and expanded answer that I'm hoping for:

• Presence indicators without Lync

• showing custom presence instead of lync presence on sharepoint page

My second question is about the contact cards that pop up on hover (in newsfeed, myseite, person name etc.) and how to use them. We have members with details on their profile but still the contact card only shows the account name (e-mail) and nothing else.

1. What's the problem? Do we need to enable or edit the contact card from elsewhere directly or something like that?

2. Also why some of the users do not get the on-hover contact card pop-ups at all?

Finally as a side question, should we get pop-up/hover panels in document libararies when hovering over the files/documents? At the moment we do not get those.

I know it's a lot of questions and I appreciate any information and help on this matter! Thank you! :)

Answer 1

The popup is indeed part of the Lync features. Lync installs a plugin (for 2010 it was an Active X one, but in 2013 I have seen presence in Chrome so I guess it is a bit changed) that scans websites for a specific type of markup (that SharePoint for example uses around names and images) and then applies for example the presence icons!

On hover of those elements, this popup comes up. Though, this popup does not retrieve its information from SharePoint, but rather from Exchange. So it is the information from Exchange / Lync that will be shown, not the information from SharePoint