Duplicate Contacts in Outlook

You got yourself a shiny new Lync 2013 environment.  You navigated the namespace maze. You tamed the certificate beast. And you even managed to persuade the network guy to open up all those ports and create the reverse proxies.

Users are logging in, chats are being had, and desktops are being shared.  All in all you feel good, and so you should.  Then, the calls start coming in.  Jim and Mary just looked at their outlook address books and they have thousands of duplicate contacts.  Has your shiny new productivity tool gone up in flames already? Or are these just the beginning drops of the flood of calls to come?

Keeping the panic at bay, let's fix this little issue and make our users happy, productive, and quiet again.

First off, to the cause.  Microsoft released a dodgy version of the Lync client at some point.  See KB2916650.  You want to be running at least version 15.0.4517.1005 of the Lync 2013 client.
Get yourself up to at least that version and the problem won't affect any new people.

Now for the existing people you have a couple of options.  First off, you can contact Microsoft and they should give you a tool to delete the duplicate contacts.  This tool didn't work for me, so on to option 2.  Run a couple of PowerShell commands in Exchange.  Yes Exchange, not in Lync.  To run these commands you will need the ability to search users mailboxes.

To check on how many contacts have been created run

Search-Mailbox –Identity “Username” –SearchQuery “This contact was added from Microsoft Lync 2013” –EstimateResultOnly

Search-Mailbox –Identity “Username” –SearchQuery





In the example above you can see Lync was kind enough to create 12,222 contacts.  Unless your users want to feel like they know a lot of people and are really important by keeping all those contacts they will probably want them gone.  To get rid of them, run the following.

Search-Mailbox –Identity “Username” –SearchQuery “This contact was added from Microsoft Lync 2013” –DeleteContent

Search-Mailbox –Identity “Username” –SearchQuery “This contact was added from Microsoft Lync 2013” –DeleteContent








And that is anticlimactically that.  All the contacts should be deleted, bringing back the happy users, and once again allowing you to engage smug mode and move on to deciding whether to to get Fallout 4 or Rise of the Tomb Raider.

As with anything you get off the internet, perform the above steps at your own risk.


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