Skype For Business Online Users Disabled ?

I recently came up against an issue that I eventually needed MSFT to investigate and come up with a solution for and in the hopes of saving someone else the trouble, I’m going to go ahead and write a small blog post about it.

Symptom: The issue was that users in Skype For Business Online were stuck in the “Disabled” state and with the Directory Status “On-premises (hybrid)”. Nothing I did changed that. But other users belonging to the same domain (“contoso.com”) were enabled without issues?
After analyzing alot of the users I found that the attribute “HostingProvider” was set to “SRV:” for the users that it didn’t work for, but “sipfed.online.lync.com” for the ones that it did work for.

Root cause: The root cause for this is that when a user is provisioned in Skype For Business Online, “O365” checks in real time for a DNS record “lyncdiscover” of the domain of the user, in this case “lyncdiscover.contoso.com”. If the DNS record is set to “webdir.online.lync.com” then the user will be provisioned as an “Online” user and enabled. But if the DNS record is something else, then it will assume the user exists in an on-premise environment and it will be provisioned as an “On-premises (hybrid)” user and disabled. And in our case, sometime during the adoption of O365 services this DNS entry lost the trailing period (“.”), so for O365 it looked like “webdir.online.lync.com.contoso.com” and that’s why it assumed they were on-prem!

The Fix: Fixing the DNS entry is easy enough so that should solve it, right? Unfortunately this check happens when a user is provisioned and then it’s set. And the only way to trigger an update is to delicense the user (that is “removing Skype For Business license”), wait a few hours and then license the user again! That will trigger a provisioning process again and O365 will see the correct DNS setting and the user will be “Enabled”!

Thank you MSFT for the details regarding this process!


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