Lync configured in Empathy on Ubuntu 13.x

Chris Anderson/ January 30, 2014/ Uncategorized/ 4 comments

This is a workaround used to get Microsoft Lync  working in Empathy Chat on Ubuntu 13.x.

First you have to install the Pidgin Sipe plugin on your machine along with Pidgin of course.  Install from command line with the following..

 sudo apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe

After installing pidgin and the sipe plugin, start pidgin and create a new account using the sipe account type (listed as Office Communicator).  Enter username which is usually your email address and login info.  Login user in my case was domain\username.

After you get your account working in pidgin, you are ready to get “import” account to Empathy.  Do so by opening a terminal window and entering the following command in it which will start an Empathy account window with an Import Accounts over it.

empathy-accounts

From there select the listed sipe account and click import. A new window may pop up asking to enter First Name, Last Name, Nickname.  You can enter your info here or skip it, it is for Empathy automatic local discovery and is not needed for your sipe account but may be handy if others are also running Ubuntu in the office.

NOTE:  The import window will not come up if you already have an account defined, I removed all accounts and restarted empathy-account again to solve this.  If there is another way to bring up the import window I am not aware of it.

The accounts window will now be displayed but the sipe account  your just imported will most likely be offline, and needs to be fixed.  Do so by selecting account and click  “Edit Connection Parameters” and then click advanced when the Connection Parameters window comes up.

OK, now a couple things need to be done here to get this to work.  First look at the account field, it should have your email address followed by your domain\login.  Only the email address should be here, (remove the comma between email and domain) remove/cut the domain\login out of this field and put it in the Login field.  Enter your normal domain password and leave the server field blank, it is not needed.  That should do it, click apply, click the on button and your account should go green after a couple minutes.

As a last step make sure you go back into pidgin and disable the Office Connection/SIPE account and close pidgin down, you do not need it any more.  Pidgin may block your connection if it is still running the sipe connection.

That’s it, you should be good to go.

Oh, as a late note, you will most like NOT be able to see your sipe account in empathy if you click the accounts menu or F4 but you can see it if you run the command empathy-accounts again.