Office Communicator in Windows 7

When using Windows XP(and I think Vista), IM applications used to pop up a window on top of your existing windows/applications whenever someone initiated a conversation with you, instantly grabbing your attention.

However in Windows 7, this phenomenon doesn't occur anymore; all it does it show a little pulsating orange light on the taskbar icon which is quite unnoticeable by most employees at work unless they really bother looking at it(and considering the taskbar can also be put on auto-hide that doesn't help lol ).

My issue is this kind of "property" of Windows 7 which is apparently not just limited to Communicator, but also translates onto WLM and other IM applications. I'd like to somehow set Communicator or maybe Windows or whatnot so that the alerts are more noticeable to people(preferably the chat window pops up over the other applications like it did in past Windows OSes).

I've seen multiple topics on Google concerning this but nobody really had an answer and the topics are quite dated so I was wondering if anyone's found anything since?

Thanks

 

Isn't there a setting in the actual IM programme to be "on top" all the time? I'm sure QIP has that...

 

There's no setting on Office Communicator as far as I can see >.<

 

Anyone? I'm open to 3rd party solutions. I see mention of a registry tweak on a forum online, but I'd rather not attempt such a tweak.

 

Backup the registry key, try it out, and if it works and you see no side effects, keep it. If it doesn't work or you do see side effects, import the backup key

 

From what I understand, Microsoft prevents applications from stealing focus because it is a security issue. So enabling it could be impossible.

 

Hey surfasb, would you mind linking me to an article or something I could read up on that security issue? I think it's something I should read if that's the case

Thanks

 

I don't recall being a security issue, but back in the XP days, about every program was using that feature because Windows 2000/XP had a bug where the focus is loss of just opened program. This was a workaround tactic used. The problem with this workaround is that every window/program was battling itself and it was a big mess, when you start multi-tasking a lot.

As this was fixed since vista, this legacy workaround actual causes problems as you see in your case. You might need to wait for a new version of the software you use.