six demon bag

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2014-03-26

Lync Automation

We're using Microsoft Lync 2010 at work, and I find it quite annoying that the software keeps resetting my status to "available" when I don't want it to. So I started looking for a way to automate setting the status back to "busy".

Unfortunately the normal Lync installation doesn't seem to include a PowerShell module. There is, however, a .Net assembly included with the Lync SDK (this article describes the details). Having to install Visual Studio, SQL Server Express and the Silverlight 4 Tools seemed a little overkill to me, though.


Well, as it turns out, you actually only need the DLLs and XML files from $env:ProgramFiles(x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\LyncSDK\Assemblies\Desktop. Copy those files to a folder of your choice (e.g. a subfolder LyncSDK in your PowerShell profile folder), then uninstall Visual Studio, SQL Server and Silverlight again.

The assembly can then be loaded like this:

Import-Module 'LyncSDK\Microsoft.Lync.Model.dll'

An introduction to the Lync API and how it can be used from PowerShell can be found on MSDN.

Posted 21:46 [permalink]