Customizing Microsoft Lync 2013 client options with registry keys

I’ve recently been asked by a client whether it was possible to set the Lync 2013 client’s Show Menu Bar option as enabled by default:

… and as any IT administrator would respond, my answer was yes because it is most likely configured via a registry key.  While I figured there is a registry key for this setting, the first approach I took was actually downloading the Office 2013 admx templates to see if the policy definitions for the user or computer configuration contained these settings.  What I found was that the policy definitions for the Lync 2013 client contained very little configuration settings so I set off to locate the setting in the registry.

Before I begin, note that the client I am using in this example is 32-bit:

With the above out of the way, all the registry settings for configuring the client is actually located at the following path:

HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0Lync

… and the registry setting for the Show Menu Bar is the REG_BINARY AlwaysShowMenu:

To following 0000 00 value disables the setting:

The following 0000 01 value enables the setting:

Another question that the client asked was whether the Minimize to the notification area instead of the task bar configuration could be enabled by default:

… and this could also be configured via the following registry key in the same path as above:

HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice15.0Lync

REG_DWORD MinimizeWindowToNotificationArea

The value of 0 is to disable and 1 is to enable:

I won’t go into the other configuration settings but most of them could be located in the same registry key folder as well.