How to roll back a Lync Phone Edition to an Office Communicator Phone Edition

I have to admit – this doesn’t sound like a process that would be utilized very often, however there is a good scenario where there is a need to downgrade your device’s code. Imagine someone buying a device that was already patched to Lync code, but was purchased with the intent to use it in an OCS 2007 or R2 environment. 
I was given a Polycom CX700 Lync Edition phone – one that had Lync RTM Phone Edition on it and was then patched to the Lync 2010 CU1 bits. So at best, a paperclip reset would only roll back to the Lync RTM edition.



Furthermore, the Lync RTM edition cannot be used to sign into an OCS environment, so you are left with a phone that needs an older version and not many documented ways to update it.

Unfortunately, this process requires that you have administrative access to a Lync 2010 environment. I would recommend this be a lab environment of course.

You need to get the Lync environment to a point where the device can be used on it. There is a ton of information out there on this, but the short list is:

• NTP server in place and _ntp._udp.domain.com record in place.
• Certificate server in place, published to AD and able to issue certs via HTTP/HTTPS.
• Automatic sign in DNS in place
• _sip._tcp.domain.com
• _sip._tls.domain.com
• _sipinternal._tcp.domain.com
• _sipinternal._tls.domain.com
• sip.domain.com
• sipinternal.domain.com
• ucupdates.domain.com and ucupdates-R2.domain.com DNS in place, and represented on the Update server’s SSL certificate for updates to occur.  (ucupdates was for OCS 2007 - ucupdates-R2 is used my OCS 2007 R2 and Lync 2010)

Basically – confirm your device can sign into the Lync 2010 organization first. For a great read and a LOT of good info on troubleshooting updates, check Jeff Schertz’s blog on Updating Lync Phone Edition Devices. Once your device is working with Lync 2010 Server, the rollback process is pretty simple. The process of rolling back the version is done using the Device Update service within Lync 2010.

1. Download the version of UCUpdates.exe that is relevant to your device type and version. I made heavy use of Jeff Schertz’s blog entry here to get the right one. For me, it was the OC 2007 R2 version for the CX700.
2. On your Lync 2010 server, import the OCPE (OC Phone Edition) into your Lync Device Updates using:
   import-CsDeviceUpdate -Identity service:Webserver:Lyncpoolserver.domain.com -FileName c:\temp\OCPE 2007R2\UcUpdates.cab
3. On the Lync 2010 Control Panel, confirm that your updates show up and are the correct version. 3.5.6907.222 is the matching version from KB2466291.


4. DO NOT APPROVE THE UPDATE – DOING THIS WILL APPLY IT TO ALL DEVICES AND UNDESIRABLE AFFECTS!

5. Under test devices create a new test device, entering the MAC address or serial number of the device you are attempting to revert versions on. This is available under Advanced->System Information from the device.
6. Reset the device, sign into it, reboot again and walk away for about 15 minutes. It needs to be completely idle to run the update.

After this time passes, the device is able to download the ‘update,’ install it, and reboot.

If you have issues with this, it is likely something with your update server configuration – check the tips in the blog linked earlier on troubleshooting – the W3SVC logs generated here can be very helpful.

The IP address changes in the screenshots are because in the first screen I was on an OCS domain, the second on a Lync 2010 environment.