Problems with the Out of Office Indicator and Status Message on Microsoft Lync 2010

This isn’t a software development problem per se, but it was a technical problem I had with Lync that does not appear to have been documented, based on my searches.
In an enterprise environment where Microsoft Lync is integrated with Exchange, Lync has an indicator that shows if your Out of Office Assistant (OoOA) in Outlook is turned on.  It appears as a little red asterisk in the lower right-hand corner of the status light.  Also, your Lync status message is automatically set to whatever your OoOA internal message is.

If you set your OoOA to be turned on and off at a scheduled time, the Lync features will be activated when the start time passes.  The problem I had was that even when the end time had passed and Outlook’s feature had been turned off automatically, Lync’s feature remained on.  Even changing the status message in Lync manually did not work; it was immediately reset to the one set up in Outlook.  Closing and reopening both Lync and Outlook had no apparent effect.

I discovered that if I manually activated the OoOA and then manually deactivated it, Lync was once again properly synched up with Exchange and the red asterisk and status message reverted to their default states.

Houston, TX 77002

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