Blocking Lync From Searching Outlook Contact Folders

NOTE: This functionality requires the latest Lync client hotfix, KB 2670326, from Feb. 2012 (7577.4072).  Download Here: 32-bit or 64-bit

Lync does a great job at searching across multiple sources for potential Lync contacts.  For example, in my scenario, I have personal contacts defined in Outlook and my Lync client will show both Lync enabled users and Outlook contacts in search results.

Note that Outlook contacts will show with the (Contacts) description beside the result.

There may be reasons that this experience is not desired.  Some companies will want to suppress the Outlook contact results to either not cause confusion or for other reasons.  Lync allows this control by using in-band client policies. 

For this example, I will create a new client policy and configure it to not search the Outlook “Contacts” folder.  Note that any contact-type folder can be specified.  I create the policy by running:

New-CsClientPolicy –Identity “ExcludeContactSearching” –ExcludedContactFolders “Contacts”

I have created a new policy, but the –ExcludeContactFolders parameter can be configured on any client policy already defined.

Next, assign the policy to the user by running:

Grant-CsClientPolicy –Identity <user> –PolicyName “ExcludeContactSearching”

After the user receives the new in-band policy, the same search tried originally will not show the Outlook contacts:

Again, this requires the 7577.4072 version of the client to work.  Hope this helps.