Monday, March 7, 2011

"Lync is Experiencing Connection Issues with the Exchange Server"

I was receiving this error on only one person's machine. If I used their account on other machines, I would get the same error on the Lync client. It was denoted by a red X in the bottom right of the client. The problem ended up being some sort of corruption in their Exchange email box. I backed up their current mailbox, disabled their current mailbox and then created a brand new mailbox. The error went away after doing this. I was able to recreate the issue by disabling the new mailbox and then reconnecting them to their old box. It was a bit annoying for the user while you're moving mail around but oh well! Dont forget to grab their Exchange Server side rules as well before you blow away the old box, or before the system blows it away for you. I'm not sure how the email box got corrupted, but this was my fix!

I am running Lync Server 2010 and Exchange 2007.

***UPDATE***July 15, 2011***

Based on one of the comments to this post, I did some additional research. The person who posted about the bad character with the contact is yet ANOTHER fix to this issue.

I deleted all the users contacts (they were left in the deleted items). Then I closed Outlook and Lync, then reopened Outlook and then Lync..... the error went away!

I moved the contacts back in blocks of 10-15 at a time trying to isolate the contact and repeating the process of opening and closing the apps. I finally got the error to come back on one of the iterations. I ended up isolating the issue to a single contact and I noticed that there was a strange character at the end of this contacts phone number. It looked like a square or in binary terms, a null byte. As soon as I deleted this "square" I was able to move this contact back and the error did not come back. Then, I moved all the rest of the contacts back in and fortunately, there were no other contacts that had this issue.

I suspect that an easy solution to this for a person who has a lot of contacts would be to export them all to a CSV file then delete the user's contacts. I don't think the special characters would make it to your export so all you would have to do is import them as new contacts. Maybe someone can test this and let the readers know.

Thanks again to the "anonymous" poster for the additional information to spark this investigation!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Anyone found a solution for this one ? I have the same problem.

Anonymous said...

I had the same issue. the problem was a contact with a special character. I removed the contact and the problem was solved

Craig said...

Thanks for that note!

Anonymous said...

I have been having the same problem, and based off the suggestion about the contact with a special character, I sent all my contacts to the deleted items folder, synced to the server and then opened lync and signed on. NO MORE ISSUES. I then started transferring them back from the deleted items folder, syncing, and resigning on to lync each time in order to determine which contact or contacts were creating the problem.

Thank you to the person who suggested this. Microsoft has not even been able to help me with this.

Also to note for others wondering if this fix is for them, all the other users in my organization were not having any issues at all. DNS and autodiscovery were working just fine however this one user account was getting this error when connecting.

Thanks Again, hope this helps others

Craig said...

Your comment sparked some additional research on my end. I had another user with the same issue and my original solutions was not working. Your observations are 100% correct. I am going to note this in my original post. Thanks again for this information, it is very valuable.

-C

Shilas said...

Hello,

having same issue on one users account. logging same user on different pc gives error as well. tried removing contacts from outlook - no joy, error still there. did you mean removing outlook contacts, or contacts added to Lync?

regards,
Shilas A.B.

Craig said...

Shilas - Yes, delete them from Outlook, not from Lync. When you remove all their Outlook contacts, and fire up Lync does the error go away? If the error persists, its likely you have a different issue. If it does, you know the problem is in one of those contacts... Let me know how it goes.

Leandro Segura said...

I have the same error, moved all the contacts to deleted items in outlook and restart both, still appears the problem. any other suggestio ???
i´m using LYNC 2010 and outlook 2010
thanks!

Martin Evers said...

Thank you!
I had this issue for months... nobody knew how to fix it.
I had a contact with Russian characters in my address book. Deleted it, restarted both outlook and lync and it fixed it!
thank you so much, it was a frustrating time.