Add Messenger Presence to Web Pages

Did you know it's extremely easy to add Messenger presence to web pages?

I recently ran across the ActiveX control "Name.NameCtrl" that you can call via client-side script and display the Messenger status icon (which also provides calendar availability, link to email, link to instant message, etc).

The control has two main methods - ShowOOUI() and HideOOUI().

The concept is simple:
1) instantiate the control on page load
2) add callable functions to Show/Hide the presence info
3) use an event such as onmouseover/onmouseout to call the functions

If you're using Microsoft's AJAX .net framework, they make it really easy providing the perfect place to instantiate the object (the built-in pageLoad() event) - and there's even a Sys.UI method for getting the X and Y coordinates of an element.

If you're not using the framework, you can still do it the old fashioned way.

For example:

  // create Messenger activexobj (using pageLoad(), body onLoad, etc)
  NameObj = new ActiveXObject("Name.NameCtrl");

  // show Messenger icons
  function ShowOOUI(name, element)
  {
     var offsetX = 0;
     var offsetY = 0;
     var parent;
     // this X/Y coordinate code was taken from the AJAX .NET framework
     for (parent = element; parent; parent = parent.offsetParent) {
       if (parent.offsetLeft) {
         offsetX += parent.offsetLeft;
       }
       if (parent.offsetTop) {
         offsetY += parent.offsetTop;
       }
     }
     NameObj.ShowOOUI(name, 1, offsetX, offsetY);
  }

  // hide Messenger icons
  function HideOOUI()
  {
     NameObj.HideOOUI();
  }

Then just call it from an element's onmouseover/onmouseout events like:
onmouseover="ShowOOUI('somebody@nowhere.com', this);"
onmouseout="HideOOUI();"

FYI - My usage has been in an intranet environment using Windows Messenger 5.1 (SIP/Live Comm Server backend). It's also my understanding that Office is what actually installs the prerequisite DLLs.

Additional info here.