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I'm at a college where we have a campus licensing agreement with Microsoft for licensing Windows and Office that now includes Office 365 online services, which includes Skype for Business. I'm playing with Skype, and it's a decent IM and presence app on it's own. The screen sharing features are nice.

The trick here is that we don't have Exchange anywhere (we have G Suite Apps for Edu handling our e-mail services). I've come across a few places in the Skype program that complain about this:

Skype for Business and Exchange aren't making a connection right now

Outlook Integration Error

The Exchange server isn't letting us connect

There are Exchange connectivity issues. Your conversation history cannot be retrieved.

The thing is... I am able to sign in and exchange messages with another user. Accounts are synced from Active Directory to Azure AD, and authentication happens via AD FS.

We have no plans or desire to add Exchange here. However, I have a hard time recommending anyone use the software if it's going to have so many "errors" right on the surface. It looks like it's my fault, that I've missed something, and will create lots of service calls. Can I make these errors go away? Have I just missed something in the setup?

Joel Coel
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1 Answers1

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Part of the Office 365 experience is when you buy the suites they are meant to be integrated and work together with very little if any input from admins or users.

Skype for Business shares some things with Outlook and looks for Exchange for certain functions.

  • Open Tools --> Options from Skype for Business
  • On the left open the personal menu
  • Turn off all the Outlook and Exchange options here
  • Save and restart Skype for Business
Jesus Shelby
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  • This worked for the installation on my machine (yay!), but how can I push this out so that my users don't have to do this? I thought about looking in group policy, but one of the things about O365 is that users can install this on personal machines outside of our domain. – Joel Coel Oct 03 '15 at 21:58
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    There is no way to set policy for all users with self service download. Actually you can't do that period, You could script a solution that updates the registry and provide that as a self service tool or just send them email or webpage with instructions. – Jesus Shelby Oct 07 '15 at 02:47
  • Um... Office 2016 has the usual GPO ADMX templates, which includes Skype for Business. I haven't checked for this specific setting, but most Skype client options are configurable via GPO. https://www.microsoft.com/en-sa/download/details.aspx?id=49030 – Thomas Feb 12 '18 at 20:06