Issues with recording in Lync build MSO 15.0.4551.1005

This morning I attempted to have a Lync conference to record an episode for our Office 365 FM fight club special with myself, Jethro Seghers, Sean McNeill, and Michael Van Horenbeeck.
We usually use Lync for our podcast recordings, however today we had a bit of a challenge…

Being the host we used my Lync Online tenant space to host the recording except there was a small problem – a few moments after hitting the record button my Lync 2013 client crashed.
I rejoined straight away and hit record again – only to crash again.

As only the host of the conference could record we needed to take action. I knew Sean McNeill uses an on-premises Lync Server 2013 deployment so asked that we move to his environment.
I rebooted and moments later we were all ready to go again – but then Sean crashed.

Looking at the common cause we both identified that we were running Lync 2013 Click 2 Run – build 15.0.4551.1005. We immediately moved over to Michael’s Lync environment – turning this into a bit of a Lync pub crawl. Within seconds of Michael hitting record he dropped off.
After coming back Michael explained his build version was the same. Jethro discovered he was also running the same build.

None of us was able to record.

The interesting point is that only the day before I had recorded an internal meeting with my team, leading me to believe that the Lync recording fails only when federated contacts are involved.
Given the November 2013 release of Lync 2013 included new features to the Lync recording functionality (as in the ability to choose the quality level) we can only surmise that a bug has been introduced.

So no recording Lync meetings with federated contacts for anyone until the December update. Life on the bleeding edge. 🙂