Lync Office 365

[clareq]

I've been tasked with setting up Lync. We have everything on-site at the moment, but have a 365 tenancy for office 365 Proplus. As Lync is available from that, my boss has asked that we set up Lync on-line. External DNS is set up, and I've installed the Lync client on my computer, however I'm unable to sign in. I assume I need to set up some internal DNS entries to point to the outside world, and probably open some ports on our firewall, but I can't find any information on-line - I'm probably looking in the wrong place - can anyone point me in the right direction?

[Sylv3r]

You may wish to use this to check the external settings are all in place too.

 

https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com

[snagrat]

If you had Lync onsite previously then there are probably Left over DNS and Autodiscover settings that means the client looks locally before external

[clareq]

No, never been installed on site, but I think it's either a firewall or DNS issue - it works externally, so it's set up correctly

[JRowley]

We have only fiddled with Lync but we got it working on site by opening the client, going to Settings, Personal tab and then clicking Advanced... you should see Automatic Configuration and Manual configuration. I presume you can deploy the settings or make them discoverable in some way but never looked into it, in the mean time you can use a manual configuration for some testing. Set both the internal and external server names to:

sipdir.online.lync.com:443

 

This should allow the client to connect to O365 and sign in.

 

You peaked my interest so I had a look myself, this KB and technet article should be all you need to configure the autodiscover:

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2566790

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398680.aspx

 

I should point out I haven't tested this, I just did a quick search.

Edited February 25, 2015 by JRowley

[scotyboy56]

When I did this at one of my primary schools, I just sent the dns records that Office 365 gave me to our county broadband team, they added it for us there end and it just worked, and I have been able to access it on my phone and everything. Try it on your phone, using your mobile data to see if it works like that.

[clareq]

@JRowley thank you - I can now log onto the client. All I need to do now is find out how to deploy that information to the 200 clients we'll have running...

[clareq]

It's a GPO setting

[JRowley]

You can configure those DNS entries on your internal DNS server, I decided to test it after all and it works nicely, no need for a GPO. Plus if you ever wanted to use it on a mobile device this is almost a requirement.