While working through Intradomain Federation efforts, there was some issues with the Skype for Business client querying the users associated to the domain, but on a Cisco IM & Presence platform.  After making a simple change and clearing the clients local cache, we were able to query the remote users.

This particular issue is the type of issue where there could be many different solutions, even as simple as clearing cache on the client side.  For my case, the solution was changing the Address Book Availability policy to force a web lookup.  Do be mindful of the change as the offline address book is intended to minimize utilization on the Skype for Business Front End Servers.

The issue is when a new user is being searched that is not provisioned within the Skype for Business solution. In this case, Ross is attempting to find ben and the error “Address book synchronizing. Results may not be current.” is displayed.  When the full email is typed in, the search completes and the user is able to be added.  The full email search creates a situation where the email address is displayed as the user contact instead of the formal name.

Address Book Lookup Failing

To verify how the Address Books are presented to the client, access the Skype for Business Power Shell and issue the command below

Get-CsClientPolicy | Select-Object Identity,AddressBookAvailability | ft

Querying the Address Book Policy

Next, we will want to change the selection to force WebSearchOnly for resolution. After applying, we can run the previous command to validate the changes.

Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity global -AddressBookAvailability WebSearchOnly

Setting the Address Book Policy

After clearing the cache from the Skype for Business endpoint, we are able to sign in and search for the users within Active Directory that are not provisioned on the Skype for Business platform.

Address Book Search Success

For further reading, Jeff Schertz provided a write up that provided the path used.