Get Ready for SKYPE for business patch.

This coming patch Tuesday the 14. April things will start to change for your LYNC users – se better come prepared 🙂

Microsoft will release an Office 2013 patch that will enable the SKYPE for business UI as default – this is whether you are running LYNC 2013 or SKYPE for business server.

I really like the new UI – and especially the great new way of handling call forwarding is nice

It is perfectly fine to let the UI change, but most customers would like to make changes like this in a controlled way, and inform/ train the users prior to such.

More info on the planned patch here:
http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/01/whats-new-in-skype-for-business-and-how-you-can-take-control-of-updates/

So how do you control the UI

Running LYNC server 2013 – you need the “latest” CU – which isn’t really the latest, what you need is December 2014 CU (5.0.8308.857) for Lync 2013 and February 2015 CU (4.0.7577.710) for Lync 2010. (so maybe “latest” is not the best word.)

This reveals a new policy control for SKYPE UI- this is well documented for both LYNC 2013 and LYNC 2010 aswell as SfB server

IF you don’t have a patched LYNC environment – luckily this can be controlled through registry alone – but as always I recommend patching to get the latest and greatest updates.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=532732 for LYNC Server 2013
and
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=532733 for LYNC server 2010

Registry:
The EnableSkypeUI REG_BINARY can be set to either 01 00 00 00 (True) or 00 00 00 00 (False).  Beats me why they did not go for a REG_dword instead.

So how does the user experience change:

Server version	EnableSkypeUI setting	Client experience
Skype for Business Server 2015	Default	Skype for Business
Skype for Business Server 2015	True	Skype for Business
Skype for Business Server 2015	False	User asked to switch to Lync mode (user can switch to Skype for Business later if you change the UI setting to $true)
Lync Server 2010 or Lync Server 2013 (with correct patches)	Default	User asked to switch to Lync mode (user can switch to Skype for Business later if you change the UI setting to $true)
Lync Server 2010 or Lync Server 2013 (with correct patches)	True	Skype for Business
Lync Server 2010 or Lync Server 2013 (with correct patches)	False	User asked to switch to Lync mode (user can switch to Skype for Business later if you change the UI setting to $true)
Lync Server 2010 or Lync Server 2013 (without patches)	Default	User asked to switch to Lync client experience (user cannot switch to Skype for Business later)

To prepare your users there is a really great awareness and adoption toolkit released from MS, that I really would urge you to take a look at:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46369

Happy SKYPE’ing 🙂