Ever since upgrading to Windows 8 at work, I have been fighting against the Lync client, which never seems to work reliably (“going black”, locking up, and various other strangeness).
Today I had a brainwave. Pidgin. The open source messaging client.
- Download Pidgin from www.pidgin.im and install it.
- Download the SIPE extension for Pidgin from sipe.sourceforge.net and install it.
You will discover you have a new “Office Communicator” connection type in Pidgin after installing the SIPE extension – the only thing left to do is configure it;
Basic Tab
- Username : Your full email address
- Login : Your full email address
- Password : Your 365 password
Advanced Tab
- Server : Blank
- Connection Type : Auto
- User Agent : UCCAPI/4.0.7577.314 OC/4.0.7577.314
- Authentication Scheme : TLS-DSK
That’s it! You should now be able to connect to Lync with Pidgin, and not bother with the “official” (read: buggy as hell) Lync client.