Getting Pidgin and Microsoft Lync to work nicely.

In the Windows centric company that I work at we use Office Communicator. Therefore I use Pidgin and the SIPE/SIMPLE plugin to be able to communicate.

Recently, they've started changing the version of OC to the latest Lync version. All of a sudden, my Pidgin would fail logging in. I checked on a Windows system and I still couldn't use the Lync client so I figured things were in transition and I didn't bother too much with it.

However, someone came to ask me about it and when I tried the Window Lync client again, I suddenly was able to log in! I tried Pidgin again and it would tell me that I was using not the right version. So I started searching around. I found that: Microsoft allows administrators to block older version of OC from connecting to the server.

So I started searching a bit more and found that others had the same problem and were looking for a solution. I then stumbled upon a very useful link.

This page describes how to set the user-agent in Pidgin so that you could connect as a certain version of OC. However, when I tried the same version on the post, that version didn't seem to work. So I started searching for a newer version and I found it...

To get Pidgin to work use the following UserAgent:

UCCAPI/4.0.7577.0 OC/4.0.7577.0 (Microsoft Lync 2010)

Tada! I'm able to chat again!

-P