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Office 365 – Understanding Archiving in Lync Online [Mac Edition]

In the recent article “Office 365 – Understanding Archiving in Lync Online“, I spent some time going through the differences between Conversation History and Archiving in Lync Online. While I’m not a Mac user, a commenter on that article asked about the behavior on a Mac. Certainly a valid question,
after all, anyone that has used the Lync client on the Mac knows that it’s quite a bit different than the Lync 2013 client in Windows.
Coincidentally, a few days later, Microsoft released an updated Lync client for Mac and in the release notes were specific references to changes in the functionality of Conversation History as well as a mention about Archiving. In the interest of providing a more complete story about Archiving in Lync Online, I added a couple Mac OS X installs to my lab environment.
     Do the Mac clients honor Lync client policies settings?
     Would there be a difference in the behavior between the new “Lync for Mac 2011 14.0.10” client and legacy versions?

The results of my testing are below…

I used the following two machines in my testing:

     OS     Mavericks (10.9.5)     Yosemite (10.10)
     Lync     14.0.9     14.0.10
     Outlook     14.4.5     15.3

As in my previous article, I tested with both Litigation Hold and In-Place Hold. I also applied the appropriate Lync Online Client Policies such that Conversation History should be blocked.

Lync Client Policies

I assigned the “ClientPolicyNoSaveIMNoArchiving” Client Policy using the following command:
     Grant-CsClientPolicy -PolicyName Tag:ClientPolicyNoSaveIMNoArchiving
Contradictory to the use of the word “Archiving” in it’s name, this policy has nothing to do with Archiving and is designed to disable the automatic saving of IMs to the “Conversation History” folder (EnableIMAutoArchiving = False) and ability of a user to save IM conversations (DisableSavingIM = False).
While the 14.0.9 client does not have the “Conversation History” functionality, the 14.0.10 client added this feature and it does appear to honor these Client Policy settings.

Conversation History

This is where the Mac client varies from the Windows Lync client. The Mac client has an option to “Save Conversations Locally” which is separate from the “Conversation History” functionality. This “local store” is located in:
     /Users/%username%/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Microsoft Lync History/
The 14.0.10 client still has the local save option and unfortunately that setting does not appear to be governed by Lync Online policies for either the 14.0.9 or 14.0.10 clients nor can the setting be controlled locally by the “Managed Preferences” function.. Aside from the local store, the “Conversation History” functionality is pretty consistent with the Windows client.

Archiving

No real changes here from the Windows client. Litigation Hold still archives Lync conversations despite the documentation. Check out my previous article for a few key points if your goal is to avoid archiving Lync conversations.

Summary

  • The “Conversation History” feature added in the 14.0.10 client honors the Client Policies in Lync Online.
  • While you can disable “Conversation History” in the 14.0.10 client, IMs can still be saved in the local store which is controlled locally in the Lync client.
  • Actual Archiving using Litigation Hold or In-Place Hold is consistent with the Windows client.

 
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