Microsoft has released Skype for Business Client.  Lync 2013 client will become Skype for Business after April 14, 2015 as part of regular Office monthly updates if performed by the organizations.

This Skype for business client will be working on  Lync 2010 & 2013 on premise registrars servers and Lync Online . But specific server builds are required on Lync Server 2013 and Lync Server 2010 onpremise in order to set client policies

Below are the prerequisites for Lync 2010 & 2013 OnPremise Servers

Minimum server Build for Lync 2013 – Deploy server build 5.0.8308.857 (December, 2014) or later.

Minimum server Build for Lync 2010 – Deploy server build 4.0.7577.710 (February, 2015) or later.

If you have the above build version on your Lync 2013 server you can go ahead and start testing .

But before setting this policy to all the users it is better that if we test this new client in few of the users and then we can deploy them to rest of the users.

Inorder to to that follow the below steps

First run Get-CsClientPolicy to check how many policies you have .

If we have any test client policy already you can try with the policy. In most of the cases we might be having only default global policy. It is better not to  play around with this since it will affect all the users if at all there is any issues.

So its better to create a new Client Policy to test this client on the few user accounts.

Run the below command to create a test client policy

New-CsClientPolicy -Identity SkypeforBusiness -EnableSkypeUI $True

Run the below command to grant the client policy to the  users for testing this client functionality.

Grant-CsClientPolicy  -Identity username -PolicyName SkypeForBusiness

Once the above is done you can download the Skype for Business client for the test users and start testing the client functionality.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-skype-for-business

Thanks 

Sathish Veerapandian

MVP – Exchange Server

Tagged: client policy, Lync 2013, Skype