Lync 2013 Now Supports Falling Back to the Lync Web App

Overview

We recently made a change to the Lync 2013 client to support the ability to fall back to the Lync Web App in the event that a user has Lync installed but has never signed in. This was frequently a challenge because various versions of Office 2013 come with Lync 2013 installed by default. There are ways that IT pros and administrators can control this however many installations include Lync 2013 by default.

The change was first introduced in Lync 2013 version 15.0.4623.1001 so if you install any version that was released after that your Lync client will contain this change. You can find a link to the most recent Lync updates at the following URL: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788954.aspx.

Challenge

Prior to this change the experience was as follows:

The user clicks on a meeting link or pastes the link into a browser

The Lync join launcher page will start up and detect that the user has Lync installed locally

Lync launches and since the user has never signed in stops processing any further. It doesn't provide an error message or description of why you can't join the meeting.

 

Resolution

After the change the experience is as follows:

The user clicks on a meeting link or pastes the link into a browser

The Lync join launcher page will start up and detect that the user has Lync installed locally

At this point Lync will start up and detect that the user is not signed in and will close.

When Lync closes a new browser window launches where the meeting can now be joined via the Lync Web App.

At this point the user can type in a Guest name and can join the meeting.

Notes

This update should automatically be available to any user that is running Office 365 ProPlus or any user that is running Office 2013 Professional Plus and is receiving automatic updates. If you do not see this behaviour ensure that you are running a Lync version greater than 15.0.4623.1001.

This does not change the existing behaviour of the Lync client which automatically launches and signs you in automatically if you click to join a meeting. The change described in this post only impacts user profiles that have never previously signed in to Lync.

This change was made primarily to support users who had legitimately never signed in to Lync before. If you want to clean up a profile though you should be able to delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync and then you will get the behaviour described above.

 

Conclusion

With this change we have overcome a significant meeting join challenge. Please review the change, check it out in your environments and provide us with your feedback.