Persistent Chat Settings Disappear

One of the best new features in Lync 2013 is the built-in Persistent Chat role. This is a new role for me and lately we have been piloting the feature in my environment. Everything is working great, but a couple of my pilot users complained about the notification settings in the client not being retained. After some testing, I found that the 2013 client would hold the settings on a simple log out, log in; but if you did a full restart of the client or rebooted the machine that settings would revert back to default of no notifications.

Doing some research, I didn't find much. These settings don't appear to be stored in the registry as the values don't change when settings are changed.

The Persistent Chat policy in Lync is very basic, basically one setting to turn persistent chat on or off for the user base. By default a Global policy is created when you enable Persistent Chat in the topology. Like most Global Policies that are assigned by default, when you look at a user in PowerShell the field shows up blank.

Global automatic policies are a great idea, but in this case appears to only partway work. It does enable users to use Persistent Chat but doesn't save their settings related to it.

As a workaround, I created a new pool policy for the pool my account is in. A few minutes later I was able to exit the client and relaunch it, and my settings remained.

The Technet article for New-CsPersistentChatPolicy doesn't mention a pool policy, but it is available through the Control Panel.

~brad

“What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment...” 
~ Nikola Tesla