Lync 2013 and Communicator 2007 Workaround

So the saga continues with trying to use the Surface Pro with Corporate applications.

In my workplace, we still have Exchange 2007 on the backend. We also leverage Communicator 2007 for communication (a lot more than I realized, actually). The issue? Attempting to log into our infrastructure with the Lync 2013 Client results in an error:

"Cannot sign in because the server version is incompatible with Microsoft Lync. Contact your support team with this information."

Well, this is not exactly a good direction. As an employee in a large enterprise, I cannot expect I.T. to support my efforts with non-standard software. It would be the lowest of the low priority.

Enter the registry keys that you'd only know about if you've performed Lync migrations! The one that we want here is "DisableServerCheck". For a full list of keys, check out the following link on TechNet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398814(v=ocs.14).aspx

To implement the workaround, open up Lync 2013. Configure the client and attempt login - you WILL see the error. That's okay - we are about to cover that.

In Windows 8, open the search bar, and type "regedit":

Browse to:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft

Create the following keys:
Office
15.0
Lync

Your present registry location will be:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync

Create a single REG_DWORD value - call it "DisableServerCheck". Set the value to "1", as follows:

Restart Lync 2013, and login should ignore the compatibility check and allow you to connect to your server.

Be careful when modifying registry, blah blah. Happy computing!