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Skype For Business 2016 – Cutting out after 5 Seconds Fix

Skype For Business is a great tool and an adequate replacement for Lync within an enterprise environment.

After moving to O365 hosted exchange, a client had issues getting the cloud-based Skype For Business running on conference machines. The issue that was happening was 10-20 seconds into the call it would disconnect with no error message. The call would just close and that was all she wrote. These conference room machines were a part of the active directory environment of this client and did not have a local account login.

The issues had the following characteristics

  • Only occurs on conference room machines
  • Happens on Windows 10
  • Intermittent and random in occurrence.

This issue had me scratching my head for a little while considering the following solutions,

  • Perhaps network-based traffic QOS rules were needed given the offsite solution?
  • Maybe, bloatware was killing the connection?
  • Antivirus could be at fault?
  • Local windows firewall killing the connection?

None of the above ended up being the case and the root cause was found to be that users were not logging out and instead were clicking “switch user” which is a “fast user switching feature”.

Here is how you disable that!

  1. Open gpedit.msc and follow the following directory structure
  2. Local Computer Policy/Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/System/Logon -> Hide Entry Points for Fast User Switching
  3. That’s it! Restart and apply group policy to verify it has been fixed

Extra credit would be creating a separate computer based OU within ADUC and apply the GPO server side for any user that logs onto these machines. This could save a considerable amount of time given the above instructions would require interaction with any communal / conference room computer that multiple users could be logged into at any given time.