For those of you who have upgraded to Microsoft Office 2016 and are using Microsoft Skype for Business 2016 with Microsoft Office 365, you may have noticed a seemingly endless authentication loop where after having successfully signed in with your Office 365 credentials, you keep getting prompted to indicate if this is a work or Microsoft Account.

This basically  makes Skype for Business 2016 (Lync’s new name) unusable so we opened a case with Microsoft to try to get a fix.

The result of the case was as follows:

1. Exit out of Skype for Business, and delete following files:

C:\Users\profile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync\Tracing   

2. Make sure you empty Lync folders under:        

C:\Users\profile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0

C:\Users\profile\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Office\15.0

3. Create these two DWORD32 entries

4. You may have to reboot the computer.

Start Skype. You will be prompted once to enter User/Pass to access corporate address book.

The other issue that we’ve noticed with Skype for Business 2016 is that after a few minutes of use the backspace key stops working in message replies and you’re stuck having to highlight words that you want to delete and use the DEL key instead.  We haven’t got a fix for that one yet, so my personal recommendation is to just avoid Skype for Business 2016 completely and revert to Skype for Business 2015 which is part of the Microsoft Office 2013 media.

To do this, in Programs and Features, select Microsoft Office 2016 and choose change.

Remove the checkbox beside Skype for Business 2016.

When that’s done, go back into Programs and Features and this time select Microsoft Office 2013 (assuming that it is still listed) and choose Change.

Check the checkbox beside Skype for Business 2015.

When done, you’re back up and running on the stable release of Lync (Skype for Business 2015) and aren’t stuck in endless authentication loops and you can actually use the backspace key.

I’ll update the article later when we get a solution to the backspace key.  For the moment we’re going to block the upgrade of Skype for Business from our volume media setup files.

Every once in a while I encounter user profiles for employees who have long since left the company that need to be deleted.

In the example below, I have a user account: "dmacdonald" that I want to delete.  The profile consumes 2 GB of storage, their user data folder another 6GB.

Step 1: Delete the user Profile from User Profiles tool:

The fastest way to get to the System Utility for user profiles:

Is to just key “User Profile” into the start menu and choose the  “Configure advanced user profile properties” link.

You can then select a profile, and then click the “Delete” button.

Normally this is all that’s required to delete the files and folders.

But this time, although it DID delete the profile from the User Profile utility and did delete the \Users\dmacdonald folder it did not actually delete the UserData files.  Those files if you attempt to access them still show Permission Denied, but using a tool like SpaceSniffer.exe I could see that the folder was still consuming nearly 6GB of storage so I didn’t just want to leave it around.

You could click through the continue boxes, and manually try to seize ownership of EACH sub-folder one at a time, and then after doing so grant yourself permission to the folder, but you don’t have time for that.  So instead, use these commands:

To fix this run these commands from an administrator command prompt:

takeown /F dmacdonald /R /D "Y"

Followed by:

icacls dmacdonald /grant Everyone:F /T

After that you can access the files and/or delete them.

After applying recent security fixes for Windows 8.1 (https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/MS15-011) my Cisco ANYConnect client failed to load.  Error:

Cisco AnyConnect: Failed to Initialize connection subsystem.

I’m not sure what it is about the most recent security updates that made it stop working, but I found that by setting it into Windows 7 Compatibility mode the issue was resolved.

The registry hack for doing this was:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

Add a string value with the string name set as the full path to this file:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco\Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client\vpnui.exe

Then set the string value to:

$ Win7RTM

After making the registry change, right-click the AnyConnect icon, and choose Quit:

Then re-launch the AnyConnect client. and all seems to work.

I love my Dell M3800 but shortly after unboxing I realized that there was no PAUSE/BREAK key on the keyboard so breaking into code was not looking good.

I eventually found a registry hack to re-map another key on the keyboard, but then I loss the functionality of that key. 

Finally a co-worker of mine discovered that pressing CTRL+Fn+F12 = CTRL+BREAK!

After installing the Windows 10 Enterprise beta the first thing you’ll notice is that Microsoft tries to make you sign into a Microsoft account immediately instead of giving you the option to first join your domain.

If you sign in immediately and then join the domain later, you’ll end up with two different profiles, both loaded with Microsoft Profile stuff, which is NOT A GOOD THING.

There’s no obvious way to “not” sign into the Microsoft account and instead join the domain.

So here’s the work around I’ve come up with.

At this point in the installation, disconnect from the Internet by either unplugging a physical netwok cable, entering airplane mode if you have the switch on your computer to do so, or otherwise just break your connection to the Internet.  If testing in a virtual machine, enter the settings of the VM< and either change the network adapter to “Host Only” such as in VMWare workstation

or if using a Windows Hyper V server, open Settings…

Then change the Networking Adapter Virtual Switch to “Not connected”.

When that step is complete, click the Back arrow at the top left of the screen to return to the previous screen, then click the “Next” button again to be presented with the old “Local Account” creation tool:

On this screen create an account name such as “Admin” – something OTHER THAN the name that you intend to log into this computer with later when joined to the domain.  This step is important to avoid ending up with your C:\User\ folder being called YourName.DomainName instead of just YourName.

When done, re-connect the machine to the network, then join the machine to the domain:

Type “Join a domain” in the box at the bottom of the screen.

Click “Change”

Enter the computer name that you want, the domain name that you want, then have a domain admin or user with add computer rights on the domain to authenticate to the domain and you’re set.

After restarting your computer, click the “Back” arrow to switch user:

Click the “Other User” option:

Then finally sign in with your domain credentials.

Note: if you aren’t normally a domain administrator, you may need your domain admin to first log into the machine to make your domain account be an admin of the machine if that is appropriate for your usage scenario.

NOTE: If you’re reading this from home and are trying to figure out how to join the domain over a VPN connection, this IS POSSIBLE by creating a shared network connection while logged in as that “Admin” user.  But that’s a topic for a different post.  If doing this with VMWare workstation, and using NAT networking as long as the host computer is already connected to the VPN this VM should also be able to use that VPN connection for the domain authentication.

Another note: Windows 10 Beta build 9926 seems to install just fine on VMWare Workstation 10 and does not appear to require an upgrade to version 11 even though the VMWare web site seems to encourage that.  I was able to successfully install VMware v10 tools to the Windows 10 machine.

One limitation of VMWare Workstation 10 however seems to be that it limits the maximum screen resolution to 2560×1920:

Supposedly version 11 fixes that and adds support for full QHD+ (3200×1800) displays like the one in my Dell M3800.  That alone may be worth the upgrade just to not be annoyed by the screen resolution not matching the actual display.  Otherwise the VM seems to run fine on Version 10.