Online Meeting: Make sure that you are signed in to Lync.

So I got a call. A user got a wonderfully friendly, useful, explanatory error message when she tried to schedule a Lync Online Meeting. Since I still can't seem to find any hits online for why this is happening, I'll paste the entire super-awesome message here for search engines to index and you to find:

The request failed. Please try again. Make sure that you are signed in to Lync.

Over the last few months, I've found that users who experience this error message are usually sending an Online Meeting out to lots of recipients. Why does this matter? Well, it's because the problem is due to one (or more) of your meeting recipients, not with the actual user.

This obviously presents a troubleshooting challenge. My standard steps are:

• Ask the user to send you a list of all of the recipients.
• Normalize this list from user-ese to csv or txt.
• Run a handy little script of your choosing to get user properties
$csv = import-csv c:\scripts\userlist.csv
foreach ($record in $csv) {
     $user = $record.Users
     get-csuser -identity $user | out-file users.log -Append       
} 
 
• Now, inspect your log for any oddities associated with one of the recipients. Usually, one will have a funky policy associated with them.
• If this doesn't help (sometimes the case), run the same script with a get-csaduser and inspect your log for users whose SIP address in Lync doesn't match the corresponding SIP address Exchange thinks they should have.
• If the above step seems too cumbersome, and you have a good user, you can always start carving off chunks of the recipients until you narrow down the one causing the issue.

Now that you've identified the problem recipient, have the meeting organizer remove that person and send their meeting request.

Fix the problem recipient. They either need a policy changed, or some massaging done to make Lync and Exchange agree.

For me, this usually happens when a user gets married, and their name got changed by somebody who decided that the steps you gave them for modifying a SIP address were too cumbersome. Now they have a SIP in Exchange that doesn't match Lync.

I typically will coordinate with the user to change their SIP address (ALWAYS CHANGE THIS IN THE LYNC POWERSHELL CONSOLE) to something temporary, then change it back to what it is supposed to be.

First:

$user = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter user name"
$usertomovesip = "sip:" + $user + "@dummydomain"
Set-CSUser -Identity $user -SipAddress $usertomovesip

Then

$user = Read-Host -Prompt "Enter user name"

$usertomove = Get-CSAdUser -Identity $user
$usertomovesmtp = $usertomove.windowsemailaddress
$usertomovesip = "sip:" + $usertomovesmtp
Set-CSUser -Identity $user -SipAddress $usertomovesip

Now, wait for Lync and Exchange to agree. Depending on your AD topology, this might take a few minutes. You can check the progress through "get-csaduser" and monitoring the Exchange properties.

If the users use cached Exchange mode, it may take a day or two for everything to replicate out, but your work should now be done.