I wrote recently regarding using Microsoft Skype for Business / Lync 2013 in Pidgin, this has worked really well for our Lubuntu 14.04 clients, running Pidgin. Having some time off work I decided to try and get this working also on my Ubuntu 14.04 laptop.

The problem is that Ubuntu uses Empathy by default, rather than Pidgin, but I found that the steps were virtually identical (cut and pasted from my earlier post):

Download and Dependencies

1. Install build tools if you don’t already have them:

   sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Install checkinstall if you don’t already have it:

   sudo apt-get install checkinstall

3. Download source files.

4. Extract source:

   tar -xvvzf pidgin-sipe-1.20.1.tar.gz

5. Change into source directory:

   cd pidgin-sipe-1.20.1

6. Read carefully the README file in the source directory.

7. Install dependencies listed in the README:

   # apt-get install libpurple-dev libtool intltool pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libxml2-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libkrb5-dev libnice-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev

These dependencies may change over time, and your particular requirements may be different from mine, so please read the README and that information should take precedence.

Compile and Install

Lastly, as an ordinary user, you should now be able to compile. If it fails at any stage, simply read the error and install the missed dependency.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo checkinstall

I found checkinstall was pre-populated with sensible settings, and I was able to continue without making any changes. Once complete a Debian package will have been created in the current directory, but it will have already been installed for you.

Add Account in Empathy

Still in a terminal type:

$ empathy-accounts

Then simply click the + button to add an account, select the Account Type “sipe”, enter your email address in the Account field and click Log-in. Then highlight the newly created account and Edit Connection Preferences, opening up the Advanced section. I completed the following:

• Login: enter your Skype for Business email address
• Password
• Server: leave blank
• Transport: auto
• User agent: UCCAPI/15.0.4420.1017 OC/15.0.4420.1017
• Authentication: auto

And that really was all that there was to it.

I was surprised to learn that Ubuntu 14.04 can talk to Skype for Business AKA Lync 2013 using the Pidgin Instant Messaging client. The general steps were:

# apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe

And then restart Pidgin and add a new Account. The Office Communicator is the relevant plugin, with the following parameters:

• Protocol: Office Communicator
• Username: Your Office 365 or Skype for Business username - probably your email address
• Password: Your password is obviously required - and will be stored unencrypted in the config file, so you may wish to leave this blank and enter at each login
• Server[:Port]: Leave empty if your set-up has autodiscovery
• Connection type: Auto
• User Agent: UCCAPI/15.0.4420.1017 OC/15.0.4420.1017
• Authentication scheme: TLS-DSK

I am unclear why the user agent is required, and whether that will need to change from time to time or not. So far it has worked fine here.

Unfortunately a few days ago the above set-up stopped working, with “Failed to authenticate with server”. It seems that you must now use version 1.20 of the Sipe plugin, which fixes “Office365 rejects RC4 in TLS-DSK”. As this version was only completed three days ago, it is not yet available in any of the Ubuntu repositories that I have been able to find, you will probably have to compile yourself.

Broadly speaking I followed these key stages:

1. Install build tools if you don’t already have them:

   sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Install checkinstall if you don’t already have it:

   sudo apt-get install checkinstall

3. Download source files.

4. Extract source:

   tar -xvvzf pidgin-sipe-1.20.1.tar.gz

5. Change into source directory:

   cd pidgin-sipe-1.20.1

6. Read carefully the README file in the source directory.

7. Install dependencies listed in the README:

   # apt-get install libpurple-dev libtool intltool pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libxml2-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libkrb5-dev libnice-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev

These dependencies may change over time, and your particular requirements may be different from mine, so please read the README and that information should take precedence.

Lastly, as an ordinary user, you should now be able to compile. If it fails at any stage, simply read the error and install the missed dependency.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo checkinstall

I found checkinstall was pre-populated with sensible settings, and I was able to continue without making any changes. Once complete a Debian package will have been created in the current directory, but it will have already been installed for you.

For some reason I found that at this stage Pidgin would no longer run, as it was now named /usr/bin/pidgin.orig instead of /usr/bin/pidgin, I tried removing and reinstalling pidgin but to no avail. In the end I created a symlink (ln -s /usr/bin/pidgin.orig /usr/bin/pidgin), but you should not do this unless you experience the same issue. If you know the reason for this I would be delighted to receive your feedback, as this isn’t a problem that I have come across before.

Restarting Pidgin and the Office Communicator sprung into life once more. Sadly I would imagine that this won’t be the last time this plugin will break, such are the vagaries of connecting to closed proprietary networks.

So, with a heavy heart I reached for my dog-eared copy of the Internet, to see what this would cost me. I knew I needed Microsoft Office Professional, as Microsoft Access is occasionally needed. I found that a full retail licence from BT Business Direct cost £205 plus VAT, not so bad after all.

I considered buying 12 of these full retail licences, but decided in the end to contact our BT account manager to request a quote. I was informed by BT that the full retail licences could not be used on a server; no explanation was given for this, but I was assured that this was the case.  The result was that the cost would in fact be £288 each, an additional £1000. A rather strange reversal of the usual - the more you buy, the lower the unit price.

As I was going to be installing on a virtual machine, I was also interested in knowing that I would be able to reinstall on a new virtual machine, if for any reason I needed to rebuild. For some reason this seemed far less clear than I would have liked, but ultimately I did receive that assurance; albeit in a way that left me wondering if that would indeed ultimately prove to be the case.

One additional confusion is that 2013 is just out, and so there was a choice of 2010 or 2013, we had been told to buy 2010 or later, in order to work with Business Intelligence, but then I read an article on ZDNet Can Microsoft bring BI to the masses if the Excel 2013 masses can’t get BI?. The upshot seems to be that Microsoft Office Professional 2013 may not be enough - I might need Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013, which as far as I can see is not even listed on BT Business Direct.

I visited the Microsoft page on Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 but this left me none the wiser. Following the link to Licensing Options looked promising, but was not. Following the link to View Licensing Options - seemed to suggest that the only option was a three year Enterprise Agreement, but there was no pricing shown, not even under the “Volume Pricing” heading.

So now I need to re-contact BT to find out if they offer Professional Plus 2013 and try and find out if this is what I need and whether I can in fact reinstall on different hardware.

To seasoned purchasers of proprietary software this might all seem par for the course, or perhaps there is an easier way that I have not yet found? I suspect that the truth is that we are too large a company for buying single licences, but too small a company for an enterprise agreement. Neither fish nor fowl, as the saying goes.

But, for the past 5 years or so, I have not had to think about licensing once. If I need a copy of office, then I download OpenOffice (or more recently LibreOffice); if I need a desktop publishing program, then I download Scribus; a graphics editor, the GIMP; an illustrator, Inkscape. And for each of those programs I can install it for all staff without even a thought about how many licences I might have available.

There is no way out for me, sadly, and I will need to navigate these difficult waters whether I like it or not, but there is a better way and that way is Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Should be able to install simply by:

# apt-get install msttcorefonts
# dpkg-reconfigure --force msttcorefonts

Manual Installation

Alternatively download each font as an .exe file and extract TTF contents (Konqueror → Actions → Extract):

• http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34153&release_id=105355

Then in KDE Control Center take option to Add Fonts.

I include in this the Wine Project, Reactos and more recently Mono, even OpenOffice’s attempts to mimic MS Office have come in for criticism. Speaking as someone who has put the Linux desktop into a company, I can tell you that the biggest problem for me was in dealing with mission-critical applications that are Windows-only. The solution for us was virtualising a Windows 2003 server

• Microsoft wins again.

I know, it’s our fault for choosing Windows software, well, here’s a newsflash, most software is written for Windows, and there aren’t always Linux alternatives. You show me Linux-compatible motor-trade software or Linux-compatible filling-station software. You can’t - they doesn’t exist. But - and here’s the crunch - I can show you .net applications in both those markets, and I can show you software that works, to a fashion, under Wine. If these technologies can be properly implemented on Linux, then you make it a whole lot easier for businesses to adopt Linux on the desktop.

And business is critical for Linux, because people are most familiar with the operating system that they use at work; if that happens to be Linux, then they are infinitely more likely to adopt Linux at home. Once Linux is in the home, then the whole family and, most importantly their children, are likely to adopt Linux. Thus the Linux snowball starts gaining momentum at last. Once there are a significant proportion of Linux users on the desktop, then developers will start to worry about cross-platform, making it even easier to adopt Linux.