FAQ
Teams presence tracking, answered.
What Presify tracks, what the green dot can and can’t tell you, how five-minute setup works, and how your data is handled.
- Free 7-day trial
- No credit card
- Nothing to install
- Five-minute setup
The short answers. Select one to read the full answer.
Tracking
What Presify tracks, what presence can and can’t tell you, how to read the flags, and asking your AI assistant.
Yes, in a lightweight form: Presify is a Microsoft Teams presence tracker. It tracks Teams presence for the people you choose and keeps the history, so you can see who’s online, when, and for how long, and spot presence that looks gamed.
Presence is the only activity it tracks. Nothing is installed on anyone’s laptop or phone, and Presify never captures screenshots, keystrokes, apps, websites, or message content. Most monitoring software installs an agent on every device to record screens, apps, and websites; Presify reads the presence Teams already has.
Need screenshots, keystroke logging, app and URL tracking, or timesheets? Presify isn’t that tool. See how Presify compares with employee monitoring software.
As with any monitoring, we recommend telling your team their Teams presence is tracked. The legal and notice questions below cover how.
Teams presence: the status your team already shows in Teams (Available, Busy, Away, Offline) and the activity behind it, such as In a call or Presenting, sampled on a short, regular interval. Presify keeps that history and turns it into a timeline per person and per team, online-time totals and trends, a 24-hour view of each person’s day, status by status, exportable reports, and flags for presence that looks gamed (reports and flags depend on your plan). Guest accounts are never tracked.
Times shown in EDT · Business hours 08:00–17:00 EDT
Sofia Reyes · Available · 8:12 AM – 9:15 AM · 1h 03m
History starts when you connect, and for each person from the moment they’re added to tracking. Teams keeps no presence history of its own, so there is nothing to backfill; from that point Presify keeps the record for your plan’s retention period, from 7 days up to 360 days. You can delete a person’s history, or your whole account’s data, at any time from Settings.

Not directly: presence isn’t productivity, and Presify doesn’t see the work itself. The green dot isn’t the whole story either. Someone can stay green all day and barely be around (a mouse jiggler keeps Teams green), and someone who always looks yellow might be doing their best work at 11pm.
What Presify gives you is a directional read on the part you can’t see today: when each person is online in Teams and how much, day after day, plus flags for presence that looks gamed. Use the pattern to ask better questions: who is consistently around in the hours you rely on, whose online time has changed, and who is putting in more time than you knew. What you do with it starts with a conversation.
No. A status only tells you what Teams showed at that moment, not whether the person was working, so one glance at the dot tells you very little. That’s why Presify keeps the history: your read on your team comes from the pattern over days and weeks, not a snapshot.
Not with certainty, because presence data can’t prove how an account stayed green. What Presify does is flag six unusual presence patterns and show how each one is calculated. The first four are the patterns a mouse jiggler or keep-alive script tends to leave; the last two mark unusual hours:
- Unbroken Available: one Available status that runs for hours without a single change.Pro and Scale
- Idle suppression: a long online stretch with no idle time at all, although Teams normally goes idle after a few minutes without keyboard or mouse input.Standard and up
- Robotic regularity: status changes spaced at unusually even intervals.Pro and Scale
- No activity variation: online most of the day with no change in Teams activity (no calls, no presenting).Pro and Scale
- Overnight presence: online time between midnight and 5 a.m.Pro and Scale
- Weekend uniformity: weekends that look statistically like weekdays.Pro and Scale
A flag is a pattern worth a look, not proof. The same late-night hours a keep-alive script fills can be someone genuinely working late, so check the timeline and talk to the person before you draw a conclusion, and never make a decision about someone on a flag alone.
Not every plan runs flags: Basic and the free trial run none, Standard runs one (Idle suppression), and Pro and Scale run all six. See pricing for everything each plan includes.
As patterns worth a look, never as conclusions. Each flag marks presence that differs from typical interactive use and shows exactly what was measured. Detection is probabilistic: a flag says what Presify observed, not why it happened or what anyone intended.
Open the person’s timeline around it, add the context you have, and use it to start a conversation. A flag should never be the sole basis for a decision about someone.
Presence is sampled by polling Microsoft Graph on a short, regular interval, so the timeline reflects each person’s status at each sample rather than every momentary change. It is built for the pattern over days and weeks, not a live feed of where someone is this second.
Yes. Every Presify plan includes a read-only connector for AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP), such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot (through Copilot Studio). Connect one and ask in plain language: when someone was online last week and for how long, how a person’s or the team’s online time is trending, which presence patterns were flagged, or when the team overlaps across time zones. Flags and coverage answers follow your plan, the same as in the app.
The connector can only read: an assistant can never change settings, add people, or write anything. It sees only what you can already see in Presify, so someone with the Monitor role gets answers about the people assigned to them and nobody else.
You can see and revoke your connections at any time under Settings, then Connections, and connections and revocations are recorded in the workspace audit log (viewable on Pro and up). Answers go to the AI provider you connected, under that provider’s terms. See how to connect an AI assistant.
No. Productivity Score is a separate Microsoft 365 feature, and Presify does not use it. Presify reads each tracked person’s Teams presence through the Microsoft Graph presence API and keeps a per-person history of it, which Teams itself does not keep.
Presify reads presence from Microsoft Graph, so when Microsoft has an outage there is nothing for us to read. You’ll see a clearly marked “No data” gap for that span, never a wrong status. Collection resumes automatically once Microsoft recovers, and you can review your workspace’s Microsoft connection history any time in Settings → Data management. Live Microsoft connectivity is also on our status page.
Setup
About five minutes: one read-only Microsoft sign-in, nothing to install.
About five minutes. A Microsoft 365 admin signs in to Presify with their Microsoft work account and approves read-only access for your organization (a one-time Microsoft consent). Then you choose who to track, person by person or from a group (on the free trial, that’s you).
Nothing is installed on anyone’s device. Presence history builds from that moment, and timelines are worth reading after the first workday.
- Step 1Sign in with MicrosoftA Microsoft 365 admin, with their work account.
- Step 2Approve access on Microsoft’s screenOne read-only consent for your organization.
- Step 3Accept terms and choose a planOr start the free 7-day trial, no credit card.
- Step 4Choose who to trackPerson by person, or from a group. On the trial, that’s you.
About five minutes, nothing installed. History starts at connect.
No. Nothing goes on anyone’s laptop or phone: no agent, no browser extension, no rollout. Presify reads the presence Teams already has through Microsoft Graph, once a Microsoft 365 admin approves read-only access. Because it reads Teams rather than the device, it works on any device people use Teams on.
For one step. A Microsoft 365 admin approves Presify’s read-only access once. After that, owners and admins run the reports, and a team lead with the Monitor role reads their own people’s timelines, all with no technical work. In a small business the owner is often the admin too, so one person can do the whole setup.
There’s no set upper limit. We’ve tested Presify on a Microsoft 365 tenant of about 2,000 users, and we can support tenants many times larger.
You can buy up to 2,000 Scale seats at checkout. For anything bigger, just reach out first: tell us how many people you plan to track and we’ll set it up with you.
Privacy
What Presify can see, where data lives, and how long it is kept.
No. Presify never reads message content, chats, calls, files, or calendar events. It uses read-only Microsoft Graph permissions, and nothing more: four application permissions that a Microsoft tenant admin grants once, plus the delegated User.Read each person grants when they sign in:
- Presence.Read.AllApplicationReads each monitored user’s Teams presence (Available, Away, Busy, Offline, and the activity behind it). This is the core signal Presify reports on.
- User.Read.AllApplicationReads basic directory profile (display name, user principal name, account type) to label the people you monitor and to exclude guest accounts.
- Directory.Read.AllApplicationReads group membership, so you can scope monitoring to a security or distribution group and keep group-based enrollment in sync.
- MailboxSettings.ReadApplicationReads only each user’s time zone and working hours from their Outlook mailbox settings, so timelines render in their local time and the business-hours overlay is correct. It does not read mailbox content (no email, no calendar), only those two settings.
- User.ReadDelegatedLets each authorized person sign in to Presify with their own Microsoft account. It grants no access to anyone else’s data.
Microsoft Graph application permissions are granted at the tenant level. Microsoft provides no way to consent to presence for only a subset of users, so the grant is tenant-wide. A broad grant is not broad access: Presify only ever collects presence for the specific people you enroll, and scope is enforced inside the product, not by the permission itself.
- You choose who is monitored. Presify collects presence only for the users you explicitly enroll (or a group you select). Everyone else in your directory is left out, even though the permission could technically read them.
- Tenant isolation. Every record is scoped to your Microsoft tenant and enforced at the database layer, with cross-tenant access tested in our CI on every change.
- Audit trail. Enrollment and every monitoring change are written to an append-only audit log naming the actor, the action, and the target.
- Least privilege, read-only. The permissions are read-only and limited to presence, the directory fields needed to label and scope users, and each person’s time zone and working hours. None of them can write to your tenant.
Presify is built and hosted in the US: your workspace data is stored and processed on US-based cloud infrastructure, wherever the people you track are located. Every record is scoped to your tenant and encrypted. Retention depends on your plan, and you can delete a user’s presence history, or your whole account’s data, at any time from Settings.
See history kept by plan, and the security page for how data is protected.
Legal and notice
Which countries Presify covers, what tracked people experience, and telling your team.
Yes, in most countries. Presify is built and hosted in the US, and it can track people in most countries except four: the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Canada. Anyone whose Microsoft 365 directory location (usage location or country) is set to one of those is excluded automatically. Where those fields are blank Presify cannot tell where someone is, so confirm that nobody you track is located in an excluded country.
Why those four: Teams presence is personal data, and they regulate monitoring it under strict data-protection regimes (the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the Swiss FADP, and Canada’s PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25), with rules on lawful basis, cross-border transfers, and data-subject rights that Presify does not support. Rather than collect that data without fully meeting those obligations, we exclude it.
Have a larger team in those countries? If your organization would track people there on an annual Scale plan (251 or more people), contact us. For a committed customer we are open to putting the safeguards those laws require in place first, under a signed agreement. Until then, people there stay excluded.
Wherever your people are, your organization is responsible for notice, consent or another lawful basis, and the local laws that apply to them, so confirm tracking is lawful before you add someone outside the US (see the Terms, Section 6.5). Your company needs a US billing address to subscribe. See the Data Processing Agreement for details.
The notice should come from you. Presify doesn’t notify anyone itself: Microsoft shows no user-facing prompt when a tenant admin approves Graph access, so we recommend telling your team their Teams presence is tracked before you start tracking them, and Presify includes a ready-to-adapt employee-notice template to help. Providing any employee notice required by law or policy is your responsibility (see the next question and our Terms, Section 6).
Beyond that, nothing changes for them. Presify reads Teams presence from the Microsoft Graph API on the server side, so there is no software on their device, no pop-up, and no extra sign-in, and Teams works exactly as it did before.
Tell your team before you start tracking. A short written notice is the safest default, and Presify includes an employee-notice template you can adapt. If you rely on an existing handbook or computer-use policy instead, check that it covers Teams presence tracking, online-time reporting, automated pattern flags, and the evenings and weekends Presify records.
Some US states (Connecticut, New York, and Delaware among them) require advance written notice before electronic monitoring begins. Other countries have their own rules for the people you track there, and requirements vary by jurisdiction and change over time. Presify records presence at every hour of the day, evenings and weekends included, so your notice should cover those hours too. Some state laws also limit monitoring outside working hours.
We always recommend confirming your obligations with your HR team and your legal counsel. Presify reports Microsoft Teams presence; deciding what notice your organization needs, and giving it, is your responsibility (see our Terms of Service, Section 6).
Billing
Free trial, upgrading, and cancellation.
Yes. You can start a free 7-day trial during onboarding, with no credit card required. A trial monitors only you, the admin who signs in, so you can see exactly how Presify reads your own Teams presence before you roll it out.
Upgrade to a paid plan anytime to add your whole team. If you do not upgrade, the trial workspace turns read-only and its data is deleted after a short grace period.
If you upgrade to a paid plan before day 7, nothing breaks: monitoring expands from just you to your whole team and collection keeps running. If you don’t upgrade, the workspace turns read-only on day 7, collection stops, and your data is kept.
A 30-day grace period follows, with a deletion countdown shown in the app, during which you can still sign in, view, and export. Upgrade any time before deletion to keep your history and lift the monitor-yourself limit.
If you still haven’t upgraded, the workspace data is deleted at the end of the grace period, and you can delete it sooner from Settings. One free trial is available per Microsoft organization every 12 months.
- First 7 daysTrial runsTracks just you. Upgrade any time to add your team.
- Day 7Read-onlyCollection stops. Your data is kept.
- Next 30 daysGrace periodSign in, view and export.
- End of graceData deletedUnless you upgrade first. You can delete it sooner.
Any time, from Settings → Billing & plan. No email required. Your subscription stays active through the end of the current billing period, after which monitoring stops and data is removed per the retention terms.
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The quickest way to judge Presify is to try it.
Connect in about five minutes and watch your own Teams presence history build. Still have a question? We’re glad to help.
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