Some of us have to work in a Windows environment at work. Often enough, people use Microsoft Lync to communicate. It is available for other platforms but that doesn’t make it any better. On Mac OS, the most viable instant messenger (IM) option is Adium. It turns out there is a SIPE plugin available for libpurple (the backend for a plethora of IMs including Pidgin). SIPE/SIMPLE is the “Lync protocol”.
Installation
Download and install Adium on your Mac:
Then download the SIPE plugin. On a Mac, SourceForge will offer the Adium plugin by default.
Once installed, you should get a success message:
Account Setup
This step is rather straightforward, add an Office Communicator account:
Fill in your mail address as username and your windows login name (including domain):
On the Options tab, set the server name to your company’s lync server (i.e. something like lync.office.example.com):
That’s it. Confirm the warning about self-signed certificates (A future post will probably deal with the Mac OS cert key chain).
Pidgin on Windows
In case you don’t like the official Lync client on Windows, there’s Pidgin. Download and install it from its homepage. Similarly to Adium, download and install the SIPE / SIMPLE plugin for Pidgin from SourceForge and follow the above guide. BTW. it’s the same on Linux 😉
