Lync is crippled if you're small (O365)
I’m subscriber to O365 for quite some time and Lync wasn’t fully functional (ability to chat with people outside of my domain) for me even once. Solutions I was able to find in Google were all the same, turn off External communications then turn it on again (and it doesn’t work, I’ve tried many times).
Today after some investigation I’ve finally found out where the problem is. It’s wrongly set SRV record. O365 is setting it as one line:
So as you can see everything lands in Type value instead be filled in properly as it’s with first record. It could be easily fixed, however there is no possibility to add or change SRV record in O365 admin panel. And support for small companies is possible only via community forums, so it’s obvious it can’t be solved as “community” has no access to admin settings. The only solution is to manage domain externally and create this record properly there, but my registrar is not supporting it. I’ve even tried CouldNS, but record with required settings can’t be set there (I don’t know why as error message is not provided).
At the end you have service which is not fully functional because implementation error on provider’s side, but you can’t have it fixed because they don’t provide such support to small companies:( Oh, cruel world.
UPDATE: To be fair I must add that recently this DNS record has been fixed, but still Lync is not able to contact with any user outside domain.