Connecting to Lync Mobility without autodiscover DNS

Recently the long awaited release of Lync 2010 Mobility pack hit the web along with clients for Android, Windows phone and the iPhone. The setup process is a little convoluted, as with anything Lync related, but is fairly straight forward none the less.

We deployed the mobility pack with the idea of giving key staff access to the Lync client within our network boundaries. This process would involve manual installation and configuration of the Lync client on these phones and we have a tricky split-brain setup, so we purposely didn't configure the autodiscover DNS.

When we configured a test client with what we through was the correct internal URL, it just hung forever at the signing in screen. Furthermore the great logging tool for the iPhone client gave us no indication of what the problem was. Everything in the log seems normal until the last line.

Lync[231:707]  is not a valid email address.

We tested the configuration using the Test-CsMcxP2PIM powershell script which returned successful, no problems there.

The Resolution

I feel so stupid, the problem was the URL we were entering into the manual internal address field on the iPhone client. After digging for a long time we finally found the URL buried in a Microsoft TechNet article while looking for something else.

https://<IntPoolFQDN>/AutoDiscover/AutoDiscover.svc/Root

The above address is the correct URL to enter into your iPhones "internal discovery address" field if you are not using autodiscover services. As soon as we changed the configuration of the iPhone client, everything worked perfectly. This is as much a note to remind myself how stupid I am as anything.