OSX Mavericks, Lync and Address book lookups

This post is a little off topic, but I hope that it will be useful to others.

OSX Mavericks has a issue/bug with Lync 2011 (tested version 14.0.7). In previous versions of OSX the two files that Lync uses for caching the address book (GalContacts.db and GalContacts.db.idx, which are located in the users Documents folder in Microsoft User DataMicrosoft Lync Datasip_<sip address>@domain.com) worked fine. In Mavericks these two files do not get updated, on a fresh Lync install they don’t even get created. This means that when you search for a user Lync returns 0 results. You can get around this from the client by searching for their full address ([email protected]). Not ideal, but it works.

To fix this you can change the default search method to WebSearchOnly for all users, or (as I did test it out by creating a new policy).

To create a new policy with this setting fire up powershell and type:

New-CsClientPolicy -Identity MacSearchPolicy -AddressBookAvailability WebSearchOnly

If you want to go ahead and apply it to all users use the command

Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity Global -AddressBookAvailability WebSearchOnly

If you are testing this for individual users then search for the user in the Lync Server control Panel, highlight the user and select Action > Assign Policies… then set the last option to your new policy:

Log out and back in to Lync, after a short period of time the policy should apply, or delete the entire contents of the sip directory above and the update should happen quicker.

2 Comments

  1. Joe Kazura April 23, 2014
  2. 802101 April 23, 2014

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.