Setting PIdgin up for Lync2013

I was able to get this working on ubuntu 13.04 (question asked on ubuntu 12.04). Here are a few pointers:

Use the full user agent string as @mason81 pointed out:

UCCAPI/15.0.4420.1017 OC/15.0.4420.1017 (Microsoft Lync)

I did not need to use a startup script to solve any write errors. e.g.

export NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0
pidgin -d

That linked repo was pointless on this distro, don't use it. It appears that on Ubuntu 13.04 you will install pidgin-sipe 1.13.3-1 by default which is an even more up-to-date version.

It appears that the pidgin/sipe setup I have installed here has a third authentication type for TLS as seen in this picture which is what I needed.

For reference, here are my connection settings that are working:

The other tabs are the defaults

Update

To get this working in ubuntu 14.04, do exactly the same, but untick the single sign on!

I manged to get this working on Ubuntu 12.04 with the pidgin (2.10.3) and pidgin-sipe (1.11.2-1ubuntu1) installed from the default precise/universe repo. We are using Lync2013 also.

I did use an environment variable to run pidgin. Without this pidgin would fail every time with a 'Read failed'. This was configured in /home/myuser/.profile by appending:

export NSS_SSL_CBC_RANDOM_IV=0

Check here for more information about why this variable is needed for sipe.

The sipe settings were as follows

'Basic' tab:

• Username: my email as used within the company (e.g [email protected])
• Login: company logon domain\username (e.g COMPANY\john.smith)

Advanced tab:

• Connections type: Auto
• User Agent: UCCAPI/15.0.4420.1017 OC/15.0.4420.1017 (Microsoft Lync)
• Use Single Sign-on: [ticked]

All other fields in Advanced were blank. I had no proxy configured.