Good evening,

In an automated updates deployment workstations that Office 2013 (Lync client) installed actually installed updates that were intended for Skype for Business 2015 client! None of these workstations had had the KB2889923 update installed that actually updates from Lync client to SFB2015 client and were all functioning as traditional Lync clients.

However, they all installed update KB3039779 that is security update for the SFB2015 client? This resulted in some strange behaviour. The Lync icons changed to SFB2015 icons, Lync within the start-menu changed to SFB2015 yet the UI remained the same - the Lync client UI not SFB2015! I've uninstalled the KB3039779 from the affected workstations and everything is now back to normal. Even stranger, this didn't affect all of our workstations but only a small number - all utilising the same version of the Lync client. The updates were deployed through an automated SCCM update.

Does anyone have any idea what has occurred here? I'm completely baffled. I'm also concerned that this could reoccur in future. The changes were only subtle and so we didn't notice them on our test deployment systems.

Thank you to anyone that takes the time to read this

Hi Matt,

The May update release on Tuesday just gone will have updated your clients to Skype4B, even if you neglected to apply the April one as you did. A few people who are not looking to expose their users to any Skype4B branding yet have been caught out by this second punch as it were.

What you experienced however is completely normal for an on-premises Lync deployment. When you apply these updates, the clients are updated to Skype4B under the hood, but the GUI will stay as the Lync interface until such time the administrator enables the SkypeUI to true in the client policies of their users. However as you've eluded to, although the GUI stays as Lync, there are some subtle changes that may confuse users if the correct level of awareness doesn't exist; the system tray will change to a Skype icon, you'll have difference sounds and ringtones, the one click join meeting experience uses Skype working instead of Lync, just to name a few.

In contrast, office 365 users are quite the opposite, and the default experience for them will to be faced with a new Skype GUI unless their admins define otherwise.

As for why some of your users were unaffected, there must have been some minor inconsistences in the level / number of updates across the user populous.

Get some awareness actions on the go and adopt ;) resistance is futile =)

Kind regards

This caused some shouting in my office today.  We discussed the Skype4B client update last month and decided not to roll it out beyond a small test group.  This month's update was deployed to all workstations, with the understanding it would be applied only to existing installations of the Skype4B client.  Instead, users came in this morning and found an updated icon, a Skype for Business first run tutorial, and a popup message telling them they have the new client but need to restart it to use the old UI.  

It looks like there is now a KB article online which discloses the fact that this "security update" will also install the Skype4B client if you haven't already.  Of course, this wasn't mentioned in the original description of the update that I see in System Center, and even the online KB article was updated to a version 2.0 at 3:38am today, so that info may have just been added to the article this morning.