Skype For Business

Mail Merge Crashes When Opening Data Source

Posted on by Adam Fowler
word crash

Sharing another problem and resolution I came across.

Recently, staff started complaining about Mail Merge crashing at the point of selecting a data source use. It was easily recreatable, and caused this event viewer error:

Faulting application name: WINWORD.EXE, version: 14.0.7113.5001, time stamp: 0x52866c04
Faulting module name: mso.dll, version: 14.0.7106.5003, time stamp: 0x5231bdf1
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00c23ab0
Faulting process id: 0xe48
Faulting application start time: 0x01d204e6d69112b6
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\WINWORD.EXE
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\office14\mso.dll
Report Id: 3bf6bbe2-70da-11e6-bd32-b8763fabbff5

Pretty standard for a crash. In our environment, we had changed from Lync 2010 to Skype for Business 2016, and installed Skype for Business through the Office 2016 installer rather than standalone, to make future Office product updates easier (Skype for Business standalone won’t co-exist with an Office 2016 suite install).

For some reason, this upgrade process has broken the mail merge function for Microsoft Word. The quick fix was to do a repair of the Office 2010 suite after the Office 2016 install, and mail merge worked again.

It’s worth noting that a computer that had Office 2010 suite and Office 2016 (Skype for Business only) worked fine, it was only if Lync 2010 was installed first and then removed, then Office 2016 installed.

Blank Page For Skype For Business Web App

Posted on by Adam Fowler

skypeforbusiness

I had an issue recently where remote clients couldn’t connect to Skype for Business online meetings – when clicking the link, all they saw in the browser was a blank page. The tab of the browser showed ‘Skype for Business Web App’ but the page area had nothing.

This didn’t seem to affect all external clients (internal was fine), when I tested on Windows Server 2012 R2 from home it worked fine. Windows 7 however was affected, and I’m not sure on Windows 8, 8.1 or 10.

This technet post mentions it breaks ‘Conferencing Functionality and PowerPoint Presentations’ as well as ‘ White Boarding, polling’ which was caused by KB3142030. Hoping that was our problem, I uninstalled the update and rebooted – but no luck.

The next check was around .NET framework 4.6.1 which is unsupported on Exchange and Skype for Business Servers (Lync too!) but we didn’t have that installed, due to using the suggested registry setting in the linked article to block the install.

After an evening of troubleshooting and rebooting servers and firewalls that didn’t help, our support found the problem for us – a misconfigured load balancer, that had an incorrect IP for one of the front-end Skype for Business servers. Updating the IP immediately resolved the issue.

Looking back on it, that explains why I had some clients work and not others – it just appeared to be in a pattern that was OS related due to the luck of round robin routing on a load balancer!

Due to the way Skype for Business handles the web requests, by first hitting an edge server then an internal front end server, you may have multiple load balancers in the way and get partial page loading.

Another lesson learnt!

Skype For Business 2016 Client Deployment Tricks

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I’ve been mucking around with Skype for Business 2016 and wanted to document what I’ve found.

First, there’s two seperate installs. A standalone Skype for Business 2016, and then as part of the Office 2016 suite, it’s one of the components (just like Word or Excel).

This is important, because if you install the standalone version then try to install Office 2016, it won’t like that Skype for Business is installed already, and tell you to uninstall before continuing. I’m not sure what reason you’d install Skype for Business 2016 standalone if you can just install that single component of Office 2016, but it’s a gotcha that might affect someone down the track.

I’ve also seen a few screen nags after deploying the client. There’s the ‘First things first’ screen which you most likely don’t want users to see:

first things first

To turn this off, set this key to ‘1’:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\General
REG_DWORD: ShownFirstRunOptin
Value: 00000001

Next is the ‘Welcome – Skype for Business’ screen. Can be annoying, and you can just surpress it from running the first time too, but let people read it on demand instead.

welcome to skype

To stop this one showing at first launch, set this key to ‘1’:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync
REG_DWORD: IsBasicTutorialSeenByUser
Value: 00000001

The final one I saw was after making calls, asking “How was the call quality?”. Most users won’t want to be hassled by this unless there’s an actual problem, so you may want to disable it.

call quality

This setting is actually controlled at the sever end, and has a % chance of showing up after each call. By default, it’s 10%, so I suggest setting it to 0%.

To do so, launch the Skype for Business Server Management Shell and run the commend ‘Get-CSClientPolicy’. This will show you how many policies you have, and you may want to change the value for just some or all, depending which users are against which policy. The field for this setting is called “RateMyCallDisplayPercentage”.

Once you’ve worked out which policy you want to change, run this command: ‘Set-CSClientPolicy -identity “policyname” -RateMyCallDisplayPercentage 0’

If you find any other tricks, feel free to share and I’ll update the post.