Automatically Populate Contacts For All Lync 2013 Users

**** UPDATE January 2015: Apologies to anyone who has been trying unsuccessfully to use the script with Exchange 2013.  It only works when contacts are stored in Lync, not in the Exchange 2013 unified contact store.  I'm not sure when I'll have time to have a look at fixing it. ****

**** UPDATE:  v1.1 of the script fixes a problem where the script would crash when attempting to update a Lync account that hadn't been logged onto before (and had no user data).  The script skips these accounts and will process them as normal once they've been logged onto at least once. ****

As a follow-up to my previous post Automatically Populate Contacts For All Lync Users which was written for Lync 2010, I've rewritten the script for Lync 2013. As per the Lync 2010 script, these were the criteria:

• A script that can be run as a scheduled task or manually
• Full automation so that new Lync users automatically:
• are added to everyone's contacts
• have their address book fully populated
• No reliance on a dedicated template Lync user for exporting contacts
• No interference with existing contacts/groups, just adding the missing ones
• An up-to-date backup of all users' homed resource data
• The ability to exclude particular users from receiving all contacts
• The ability to exclude particular users from being added to all address books
• The ability to define a list of particular users to be added to all address books (instead of adding all Lync users)
• A testing mode so that results can be checked without making any changes to Lync
• Logging with email notifications
• No notifications or popups in clients when contacts are added

The Lync 2010 version of the script relied on the dbimpexp.exe tool but this functionality has been moved into Lync 2013 PowerShell commands (*-csuserdata).  The 2013 script is cleaner in the way it manipulates the XML.

Instructions for deploying the script are included in the script. If you want to run it as a scheduled task, follow the instructions in the Lync 2010 blog.

The script can be downloaded here:

UpdateLync2013Contacts.ps1 (zipped)


This post in its entirety is the copyright of Roland Paix. I don't mind if you link to it but if you copy any of the content you must provide a link to the post and credit me appropriately.