How to get Lync working on Mac [updated]

Early September the good news started spreading among Microsoft Office fans who are for whatever reason using a Mac. Microsoft announced the release of Lync for Mac. Lync is Microsoft’s new integrated functionality for instant messaging, presence, conferencing and voice. Unfortunately, after installation I didn’t get it working. Today, I finally managed.

Update

On October 21, 2011, Microsoft has released an important update for Lync that should resolve the issues below. Normally the Microsoft AutoUpdate should inform you about it. Don’t forget to quit the application before updating and restarting.

It should work with Office 365

Recently, we’ve migrated from Google Apps to Office 365. Both solutions have pro’s and con’s, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s quite easy to benefit from Office 365 if you are using Office 2011 for Mac. But the same seemed not directly applicable to Lync. It was just impossible to login. The top lines of the error logs included:

Error Signature:

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS

The solution is there!

Once I found this error code I used Google to look for solutions. Tom Laciano wrote it all down already. Below I will describe the steps I took to get it working:

1. Lookup a “unknown” certificate in your Keychain and delete it. How to manage is well described here. Unfortunately, this didn’t fully solve the issue.
2. I decided to delete the Lync directory in the Documents>Microsoft User Data>Microsoft Lync Data, you will be able to find it through “Finder”.
3. Under the advanced tab on the Lync login screen I added the server name sipdir.online.lync.com:443. Afterwards the error message changed.
4. Unfortunately I still couldn’t login. The weird idea, as mentioned in Tom Laciano’s post, to use a wrong user id (I used a “\” in front of my user name) finally made it work. Of course it didn’t work with this wrong user name, it generated a login error message again. But once I entered the right username afterwards it worked.