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My employer uses Lync for all of our desk phones, and one of the features of Lync is that you can set your phone number to forward to another, say your cell or home phone.

To do so, you have to click on a dumb little icon in the lower left corner of the window, and select that from a (short) menu (one menu entry prompts you for a phone number, if you don't have one set).

Is there any way to script that functionality, either on a computer with or without Lync installed? Ideally, there's some perl module that can fake this (when provided with a username/password)... but if it was a windows bat script that only worked if the machine had Lync installed I could make use of that too.

I poked around in the DLLs that Lync uses, hoping I could cobble something together with rundll32.exe, but it's a maze of twisty passages. If there is a management web page that Lync server allows someone to change that stuff from, our server admins never installed it.

Does anyone have any ideas?

2 Answers 2

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I would suggest Automate You can record the actions and automate by time etc. Works great for me.

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  • Thank you, but I'm wanting to use this with enterprise scheduling software. Me and a few others would like to ditch the poc cell phone, have telecom issue us a new phone number, and then automate it forwarding to our personal cells every week. The scheduling software can run windows exe's (and just about everything else), but anything that involves recording mouse clicks and playing them back as macros is probably too fragile for our needs.
    – John O
    Aug 2, 2012 at 18:32
  • Ah okay, Got a better understanding now. This is not the correct way to do it in this circumstance. Hope you come right! Aug 2, 2012 at 18:36
  • Push come to shove, I can always try to write a C# console app, but the API for those libraries is monstrous. And it just shows how technically illiterate the managers are at Microsoft that key functionality is absolutely unscriptable like this.
    – John O
    Aug 2, 2012 at 18:47
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I would propose using FreeSWITCH as an application server alongside Lync. FreeSWITCH is The Voice Application Platform, so you are provided with programmable behavior in every aspect.

So, your session border controller (if you have one. If you don't, just place FreeSWITCH in front of Lync), would forward the calls to a FreeSWITCH box, it would do the automated part of the logic, and then connect to your Lync server whenever it needs to reach your softphone or voice mail.

Of course this is only a sketch, and the whole solution needs to be carefully engineered and tested.

BTW, here I described a call forking scenario: FreeSWITCH can actually fork your call to several destinations, whichever answers first.

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  • Telecom is a whole other department. This isn't an important enough project to ever get approval for such a thing. Besides, it seems overkill to me... why should we need another server to be able to have a phone number forwarded once per week?
    – John O
    Aug 6, 2012 at 2:31
  • of course, I don't know all your requirements, so it's difficult to propose something that fits immediately :) But basically, there is a nice way to move the intelligence and added-value features outside of Lync server. There's a bunch of other nice features in the tool. Aug 7, 2012 at 20:57

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