Recently I started doing a little usability testing of SharePoint Online within Office 365 with my MacBook Pro running Mac OSX Lion (10.7.3) and figured, “While I’m here, why not pop open the Lync client to be able to keep in touch with colleagues working on solutions?”
So I double tapped the command button to bring up Alfred and typed in “Ly” to bring up the Lync client.
So once the Lync client was up and looking pretty on my screen, I put in my credentials, figuring that my e-mail address and user ID were probably both my e-mail address. So I clicked “Sign In” and spin baby spin… the color wheel of Appledom went forth to conquer, only to sit and time out, not connecting, not discovery the SIP server of Microsoft’s Lync servers, not allowing me to find my connected colleagues. I sat and wondered, “Strange, my Windows Lync client discovers Office 365’s Lync servers, albeit it takes a little while, but it finds them, why can’t the Mac client?”
First things first – yes, I’m using my own domain name entry that’s redirected the DNS Name Servers to Microsoft’s so as to let them handle the DNS components.
Second thing – yes I’ve got Microsoft Office 11 running with Service Pack 2 and I’ve loaded the Office 365 sign-in tool to assist with some of the login.
So back on the ranch… while sitting there waiting for a while I wondered, “Is this a known bug, did I forget to read an FAQ?” The answer would be yes, I missed the memo.
Microsoft has a nice little article on the Downloads page for Mac software from Office 365 that points to this article:
Set up Lync for Mac 2011 for Office 365 – http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-smallbusinesses/hh534384.aspx
Basically it details the following:
Use your e-mail address / Cloud ID for both the User ID and the E-mail Address.
Click on Advanced and then put in the Microsoft Lync internal and external server settings as:
sipdir.online.lync.com:443
Go back to the sign in page and click sign in and you’re good to go.
Wondering why it is that the Mac Lync client can’t perform discovery while the Windows version can without any configuration… granted, the autodiscovery process for the Windows client seems to take a while… perhaps it’s time to do this on the Windows client for zippy login?
The Tech Blog of Dan Usher 