GUI Usability: Who’s Offline?

I use Pidgin® on Windows® to join multiple chat and instant message accounts into one display on my office computers. I often forget to log out when I leave my office for the day. For most of my accounts, I can be logged in on more than one computer at a time, but not for my Novell®GroupWise® Instant Messenger (GWIM) account. Whenever I log on to GWIM somewhere, I am automatically logged off from any other computer. This includes when I log on at home later in the evening. One morning not long ago I was working in my office and wanted to send a message to a colleague that I had been chatting with the previous afternoon through my GWIM account. The Pidgin messaging window from that chat was still open from the previous day. Figure 1 is an example of what that window looked like (though I changed the name to Someone). ...