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 Data\Microsoft Lync Data\sip_<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 (johndoe@domain.com). 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.

CCIE #49337, author of CCNA and Beyond, BGP for Cisco Networks, MPLS for Cisco Networks, VPNs and NAT for Cisco Networks.

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Joe Kazura
23 April 2014 at 04:30 delete

So, on the Mac, where does one find "powershell"? Those are obviously not UNIX-like commands for the Terminal. Are these to be done/used/executed on the Windows communications server by one of the ADMINs?

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802101
23 April 2014 at 05:14 delete

Powershell is all on the Lync front end server, not on the mac. Once the changes has been applied on the Lync front end it will be picked up by the Mac client.

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