OWA: Setting up the Skype for Business Meeting Scheduler

pchettriIT Director
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Enabling the Skype for Business Meeting Scheduler in Hybrid OWA

The Skype for Business Meeting Scheduler in the Outlook Web Access (OWA) calendar is an important feature.  It allows you to schedule meeting in advance and send link to non-skype users and if you are MAC Outlook user then you would only get this option in OWA.


This is more applicable if your company has non Windows or Mac workstations that use OWA to access the full features of Skype for Business.  Note that Outlook 2016 for Mac and older versions of Outlook, do not support the Skype for Business add-in.


After several trials, I figured out that Web access for Office365 email and calendar is the only way to access the Skype for Business Meeting Scheduling feature for Non Windows users. 


** Note ** The setup you'll see below is based on a hybrid environment (co-existence of on-premise and online email) and of course user email has to be migrated to Office365, as you do not want to keep on-premise forever and miss on additional feature and tool that comes along with Office365 license.


So if you have a hybrid deployment and are using Skype for Business from Office365 and would like to get the Meeting Scheduler working, read on.


In my hybrid deployment, all the DNS configuration for email and general setup of the environment were correct and the system was working without issue. However, the Skype for Business tab in OWA was still missing. To fix the issue and have the Meeting Scheduler tab appear, required additional DNS SRV records.


There is an article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2566790/troubleshooting-skype-for-business-online-dns-configuration-issues-in-office-365/en-us/help/2566790/troubleshooting-skype-for-business-online-dns-configuration-issues-in-office-365/a>  from Microsoft describing how to create SRV records and CNAME records with Lync services. This initially sounded irrelevant and impractical as Outlook for Windows could still schedule a meeting but those entries certainly worked like a charm for getting the Skype for Business Scheduling features to appear in OWA.

 

To resolve these issues, make sure that you add the following service (SRV) and alias (CNAME) records to your Domain Name System (DNS) host.


SRV records

Type Service Protocol Port Weight Priority TTL Name Target
SRV _sip _tls 443 1 100 1 hour <DomainName> sipdir.online.lync.com/td>
SRV _sipfederationtls _tcp 5061 1 100 1 hour <DomainName> sipfed.online.lync.com/td>


CNAME records

Type Host name Destination TTL
CNAME sip.<DomainName> sipdir.online.lync.com/td> 1 hour
CNAME lyncdiscover.<DomainName> webdir.online.lync.com/td> 1 hour


** NOTE ** The <DomainName> placeholder in this table represents the name of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) domain of your organization, such as contoso.com.


The DNS information above is extracted from the Microsoft support article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2566790/troubleshooting-skype-for-business-online-dns-configuration-issues-in-office-365.



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pchettriIT Director
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Comments (1)

pchettriIT Director
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Commented:
Thanks for your suggestion and I have updated the subject and summary, as advised. However, I would not be able to paste screenshots of DNS from production. For details, reference I have included the MS line that shows exact entry for DNS. Specific process of adding DNS entry would vary between console from different vendor, therefore, screenshot might not be useful, even if I used the screen shot from the vendor I use.

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