Managing user contact lists in Lync

What? Manage contact lists in Lync? Why would you do that?

I understand both arguments to this. One one hand, adding contacts isn't that hard to do. Despite being buddy-buddy with Exchange and being very feature packed, Lync is still just an IM client for many organizations. From the end-user perspective, it's as easy to manage as Google Chat, AIM, or Pidgin is (which are all more or less easy to use). So if it's so easy to use, why would you manage contact lists for your users?

Because this is a company communication method and all of the other company communication methods are managed by IT. Email, phone system... That's about it. One could argue that it's about providing an efficient way to contact colleagues within your organization. We manage contact lists in Lync for our users (Lync Server 2010) but we're looking to move to Lync Server 2013 and our custom script won't work. I was asked by one of our Admins a while ago to look into a couple tools we might be able to help us overcome this; Here's what I found.


If you want to manage contact lists in Lync, there's only 2 games in town: LUMT and Vytru Contacts Manager 3.x.

For what it's worth, Lync 2013 does have it's own contact management Powershell cmdlets (Export CsUserData and Import CsUserData) but these only works after the user has logged in for the first time. When a new user is created, their CsUserData info is basically an empty XML file and doesn't exist for most intents and purposes until the user logs in for the first time. My organization didn't want to go that route. We wanted everything to work out of the box for a new user.

LUMT, short for Lync User Management Tool is a free program written by Stefan Plizga. If you're interested in learning more about this program or want to take it for a test drive yourself, the URL is http://lumt.codeplex.com/. Here's my thoughts on it.

• The documentation is poor. It gives a very bare-bones explanation of what's needed to setup the tool to even run and basic command syntax. I don't consider myself dumb but the documentation for LUMT left me with more questions than answers. 
• The setup is complicated. After going through the light documentation, LUMT apparently requires it to be setup on an application server separate from the server running the Lync Server role.
• The disclaimer on the main page states that this is as-is software. It's free but it's not open-source so it's not as though we can modify it to meet our needs without violating the MS-PL license agreement. Even if we got this tool working like we need it to, meeting our needs would require scripting which may or may not be possible. Furthermore, we'd be completely screwed if a future update to Lync Server broke the functionality of this tool. 
• Nobody else seems to be using it. While I can understand the organzational need to manage user contact lists for Lync, it's not a normal thing to manage. This likely explains why we had to come up with a custom solution for our current Lync server and why there's a genuine lack of tools for this out of the box. It's quite a niche' need. When looking up LUMT, I found several blog posts acknowledging it's existence but couldn't see any evidence or read any reports of anyone actually using it. 

The next tool I looked up was from an Egyptian company called Vytru. They make 3rd party add-ons for Lync. Their Contacts Manager program is actually a custom MMC. It allows Lync Administrators to create contact lists and add them directly to individuals or groups. For such a niche need, it's actually a pretty cool program and actually works. We never got into production for us, however, as the program was said to be $8k for the number of users we had. I think that's probably more than we pay for Lync entirely. Our Senior Admin deemed this feature not worth that kind of price. If you're interested in checking it out, I've included the product video from Vytru's website here, which gives a pretty good tour of Contacts Manager. 

I'm writing this because nobody else seems to have any thorough discussions on the topic so I figured I'd put what I have out there for any other poor Jr Admin working on a similar project. 

Good luck.