Hi Caroline:

                I have seen this before, but there could be several causes.  A few things to think about:

1. Is the Skype for Business server on prem or in O365?
2. What is the connection like between the client machine in question and the server?
3. If the user goes ahead and IMs or calls one of these presents unknown contacts, does the IM or call go through normally?
4. Does the Skype Outlook addin show the correct presents information when the user tries to email the person or in the user’s Outlook contacts folder?
5. Are these contacts in the same domain or is there federation going on?

Generally when I see this it means that there’s either a lag between the client machine updating the presents status from the SFB server or there’s a problem with federation between two orgs in an onprem situation.  As I said though there could be several causes here so these are just some things to think about when starting to look and you may have already ruled these all out.

Ryan

From: Caroline Ford via Blind-sysadmins <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org>
Reply-To: Mailing list for blind system administrators <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org>
Date: Thursday, September 3, 2020 at 3:26 AM
To: "'blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org'" <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org>
Cc: Caroline Ford <Caroline.Ford@northlincs.gov.uk>
Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Skype For Business and Presence Unknown

Hi,

We are experiencing a strange situation with Skype For Business.  A few of our users are reporting that when they search for certain colleagues, they are found in the Skype address book but they are showing as presence unknown.  When others search for the same people, their presence is reported correctly.

We have tried the following for a user who is being presented with the presence unknown problem:

Copying over a cached address book to the affected machine by replacing the GALContacts files in C:\users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync\sip_<user>;

Removing all the files from the sip_<user> folder and allowing Skype to re-create them;

Removing any contacts from the user's Skype favourites list for people who are being reported as presence unknown;

Removing any contacts from the user's mailbox for people who are being reported as presence unknown.

None of the above has solved the problem.

Has anyone experienced this before, and if so, do you have any suggestions about what we can try next?  I've googled the problem and haven't found anything except what we have already tried.

Caroline.

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