Using your iPad, iPhone or Windows Phone with Lync 2010 and Office 365

  • Article

I have had a few recently from customers wanting to use Lync 2010 Mobile on their shiny mobile devices. I thought I would go through the steps here to connect iOS devices, such as iPad and iPhone as well as Windows Phone WP7 devices to Lync Online in Office 365.

Prerequisites

This post assumes that you have configured your tenant correctly and have all of the necessary DNS records in place. To check what you should have in pace

Check that each and every one of the DNS records required for Lync is in place and configured correctly. It is not worth continuing unless this has been done (because it won't work! ?).

iPad and iPhone

I am going to use my iPad here but the same approach should work for your iPhone.

First we need to download the Lync 2010 App from the App Store, the easiest way is to search for it in the App store on your device but you can do it via iTunes as well if you need to.

Once downloaded you should now have the Lync 2010 App icon on your device…

When you first start the app it will ask you to login, you will need to know the following information

  • Sign-in Address: This is your UserPrincipalName
  • Password: Yeah, this is your password ?
  • User Name <Click More Details>: This is your UserPrincipalName

Your UserPrincipalName (UPN) is usually the same as your email address, but it may not be. This will be the name you use to login to the Office 365 portal with.

Enter the login details at the Sign-in page and tap Sign-in…

Lync will then validate your credentials and attempt to log in…

Once logged in you should see the contacts page – as you can see I don't have many friends in my lab ?

There is an info screen for settings and general configuration…

Plus a screen showing your current Chats…

I really just wanted to show how to connect in this post, so I am not going to dig into any of the detailed usage here.

Windows Phone

Firstly we need to download the Lync 2010 app from the Windows Phone Marketplace. The easiest way to do this is to search for it on your WP device. Once installed, you should have an icon for Lync 2010 – I have pinned mine to the start screen for easy access and the live tiles.

Note: WP does not have the ability to take screenshots so I am attempting to do my best with my HTC Mozart and my Cannon DSLR – I will apologise for the quality before we go on ?

On opening Lync 2010 will request your credentials, these are exactly the same as for the iPad and iPhone versions..

  • Sign-in Address: This is your UserPrincipalName
  • Password: Yeah, this is your password ?
  • User name <Click More Details>: This is your UserPrincipalName

Your UserPrincipalName (UPN) is usually the same as your email address, but it may not be. This will be the name you use to login to the Office 365 portal with.

Tap the circle with a tick inside at the bottom and Lync 2010 will attempt to log you in to Office 365…

Once connected for the first time Lync 2010 will run through a few initial start-up screens…

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post shows that's it's pretty easy to connect your mobile device to Lync 2010 in Microsoft Office 365. The most common causes of connection problems that I see are either incorrect DNS records or ADFS authentication problems (for federated identities obviously!).

I would like to dig into these mobile a clients further but this post is already much longer than I anticipated, so I am going to leave it as just a connection post and do something in the future about the features and functionality that these clients provide.