In Lync 2010 and 2013, if you are too popular, when someone adds you to their contact list they will see the following message “Maximum Followers Reached”. This topic is also covered in TechNet. This can be an annoyance in very large companies or people who are too cool for their own good. 🙂
By default, Lync will allow 200 people to “follow” you or add you to their contact list and see your presence, but it’s not that simple. Lync will actually allow 1000 subscriptions to your account. When someone subscribes they are actually making 5 calls for information, therefore only 200 can follow you. This setting is controlled in the Global Presence Policy by the MaxCategorySubscription attribute. This attribute can be anything between 0-3000, in other words you can allow up to 600 people to follow you.
You can run Get-CsPresencePolicy to see the current setting. By default, all users are not configured for a Presence Policy, so they will inherit the Global policy. Run the Get-CsUser cmdlet to see the setting on your account.
You can modify this setting at the Global level for all users, but in general I don’t like to increase the default limits set by Microsoft, so I would recommend creating a new Presence Policy using New-CsPresencePolicy cmdlet and assigning it to particular users using Grant-CsPresencePolicy cmdlet. Changing this for all users can increase your server load for this feature up to 3 times.
New-CsPresencePolicy -Identity TheCoolPeople –MaxCategorySubscription 3000
To assign the policy to a user account you need to use the Grant-CsPresencePolicy cmdlet, but I like the check the setting ahead of time using the Get-CsUser cmdlet like thus.
Get-CsUser David_Rowe | ft Identity, PresencePolicy
Then
Grant-CsPresencePolicy -Identity david_rowe -PolicyName "TheCoolPeople"
Then you can check the policy is assigned to the account.
Get-CsUser David_Rowe | ft Identity, PresencePolicy
Now I am a member of TheCoolPeople and 600 people can follow me in their Lync client.