How can I stop autoupdates for Lync basic 2013

Question

I am currently working a school co-op placement at a company and the problem I have to solve is to stop autoupdates going through for lync 2013 basic. We do not have a lync server as it died recently and spending the money on a new one was not a viable option. Lync is set up in cloud as an alternative to having a server. The reason I need to stop lync from updating is that when it does update it uninstalls office 365 components and we would like to stop that from happening. I have played around with windows firewall settings and for now have blocked all windows updates from going through but this is not an ideal solution. Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Answer 1

If you are not managing updates centrally thru WSUS or SCCM/WSUS you are limited in what you can do. I would move to figure out why the updates are breaking your office install, disabling updates leaves you in a precarious state.

Skype for Business client is part of the O365 package. My guess is you may have somehow deployed two different installation types. Your Office Pro Plus (word, excel, etc) sounds like they are using the O365 click-to-run deployment but your Lync client is traditional MSI based installation. Microsoft doesn't support these together, they should all be click-to-run or MSI installer based not a mix. If you get them all on the same type of installer, I think you will find you no longer have the issue with updates.

EDIT

Office Pro Plus usually includes Lync (skype for business) in the download already. If it doesn't you should have the option to download it separate from Office 365 software page (same page you got office from). If you need Office as MSI - download the trial version and just sign in with a valid O365 account. Microsoft has made the MSI version nearly impossible to obtain at this point.