{"id":5543,"date":"2015-04-14T19:12:27","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T18:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5543"},"modified":"2015-04-14T20:19:22","modified_gmt":"2015-04-14T19:19:22","slug":"lync-becomes-skype-for-business-today-a-quick-round-up-of-what-that-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2015\/04\/lync-becomes-skype-for-business-today-a-quick-round-up-of-what-that-means.htm","title":{"rendered":"Lync becomes Skype for Business today – a quick round-up of what that means"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been a fair amount of panic\u00a0in some quarters as a colleague\u00a0heard that one of the “patch Tuesday” updates will update our\u00a0Lync 2013 clients to\u00a0Skype for Business (which became\u00a0generally available today<\/a>). That brings a new user experience and potentially confusion for our users (who are only just getting their heads around switching from OCS and WebEx!).\u00a0Later on it seemed that the update\u00a0only applied to Click-to-Run Office ProPlus subscriptions (we have perpetually-licensed MSI-based installations) and finally we got something that\u00a0I could use to set my colleagues’ minds at rest in a blog post from Scott Stubberfield<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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  1. “Patch Tuesday” implies security updates but the Skype for Business update is part of the April monthly update for Office 2013<\/em> (i.e. an optional update).<\/li>\n
  2. Quoting Scott’s post, “If you are using Lync Online today with Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business Premium or Office 2013, the updated Skype for Business client\u00a0[…]\u00a0will be the default user experience and replace the Lync user experience.\u00a0 If you are using Lync Server today, the Lync UI will be the default experience.”. That last sentence is the vital one [although I could have saved a lot of time and effort if I’d seem Martin Boam’s post earlier in the day<\/a>!].<\/li>\n
  3. It is possible to\u00a0control the user experience (there’s a PowerPoint presentation linked in Scott’s post). We knew that anyway but some of the documentation suggested the registry change needed to be applied\u00a0in advance of the update. Certainly on my preview client I can switch back and forth at will between the two UIs, using the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Office\\Lync] key, with a value name EnableSkypeUI<\/code>, and the data 00 00 00 00<\/code>. I haven’t got the update yet to test the final release.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Background information<\/h3>\n

    There’s a whole load more information in some really useful posts that\u00a0Tom Arbuthnot and Matt Landis have put out in the last few days (and an older post from Mark Vale):<\/p>\n