I would like to always appear online and active in Skype, so that if I forgot to login or have a glitch with it people won't assume I'm not working, etc, etc. It seems like some of my co-workers have figured out how to do this, but unfortunately not the ones I'd be comfortable asking about it.
There are some things I've tried as partial solutions but they all have drawbacks and limitations:
- Installed Skype for Business on my phone
- Drawback: shows you as "mobile"
- Limitation: does not offer as much control over status settings as the desktop version, so it keeps switching to "inactive")
- Change settings on desktop version to auto-start Skype and to appear as "available" as much as possible
- Limitation: doesn't help when my computer is turned off, booting up, frozen, using an alternate (live) distro, etc, etc
- Limitation: sometimes the automatic start/login doesn't work, especially if the internet and company VPN connections are still being established when it attempts to logon.
- Get a cheap commercial remote desktop and run Skype on there, with the optimized settings
- Drawback: I don't receive the messages on my work laptop or phone when this is the only logged-in instance of Skype (hence the caveat of "w/o losing messages" in my question title)
I appreciate any suggestions/hacks you can offer. I think that one solution would be if there was someway to do the remote desktop idea again but to force it to email me copies of IM's that I miss and to avoid any potential issues with being logged in from more than one instance/location.
Another potential type of solution might be if there's a way to "hack" the mobile version, to force it to always say "available" and not to betray me by indicating that I'm only logged in on a mobile device (?).