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I have recently joined an institution that uses Skype for Business as telephony solution. This is a commercial product from Microsoft that was never released for desktop Linux (and probably never will).

There is a Linux clone called Wync that is able to connect to the same telephony network, but this is just another commercial solution.

There is a plug-in for Pidgin called SIPE that is supposed to integrate with the Skype for Business network, but it seems nonoperational on Ubuntu 14.04. Once the plug-in is activated Pidgin keeps regurgitating error messages that render it useless.

What other free options are there to connect to this telephony network from Ubuntu?

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  • Skype for Linux has no equivalent access software for Linux, nor anything that works with it.
    – Thomas Ward ♦
    Mar 15, 2016 at 16:28
  • That question is unrelated to this issue.
    – Luís de Sousa
    Mar 30, 2017 at 6:29

2 Answers 2

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There is some information here from Chris Rob about using Skype for Business on Ubuntu 14.04 with Pidgin.

Seems you need to compile/install the latest SIPE plug in for Pidgin and then configure to connect to the Skype for Business server.

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  • Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.
    – Anwar
    Nov 8, 2016 at 7:15
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    sudo apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe and then open Pidgin and add an account. In the basic configuration choose Office Communicator as the Protocol, your email as the Username and then "domain\username" as the Login
    – Francesco Borzi
    Mar 27, 2017 at 10:56
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I have made some, but not complete progress with the following.

For me, the standard pidgin sipe plugin, through Office Communicator, let me connect to Skype for Business and see my employer's user directory, but crucially, did not succeed in a test call or a call to another user, with a variety of error messages. Even text messages to others did not arrive, despite pidgin giving no error message. However, there is a newer version of the plugin, as indicated in this Reddit post:

Hello, as already mentioned Pidgin is the way to go.

Unfortunately the default version in more or less all the distributions comes with a combination of pidgin-sipe / libnice / gstreamer / farstream which doesn't work at all in the worst case (= only chat works), and doesn't allow calling Skype for Business clients in the best case (= you can only call Pidgin and Lync clients). The patches to make everything work are available upstream but some of the packages have not included them in official releases.

The solution for Ubuntu is to use this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~sipe-collab

which has been ported also to Fedora: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/dwmw2/sipecollab/

Starting from those two add-ons it can be made working on more or less all the other Linux distributions (we managed to get it working on CentOS 7).

HTH

To make it work, I did:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sipe-collab/ppa

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install pidgin-sipe

Now, the test call works. However, when trying to join a conference call I got:

Failed to join the conference

no reason given

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