Skype for Business / Lync 2013 Outlook Properties Dialog Implementation

Since the advent of Office 2013, I've been increasingly frustrated with the new Outlook contact cards, and the round-about way needed to access the legacy GAL properties dialog as shown below:

After a ton of research, I discovered it's possible to add custom context menus within the Lync 2013 / Skype for Business client, as per this page from Microsoft.  From here, I needed to discover the API necessary to actually launch the legacy GAL properties dialog box.  Doing a bit of research, I simply could not find an easy way to do this, the only thing I was coming across was the following registry key, which just launched the GAL properties box from within Outlook:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\common\contactcard
DWORD: TurnOnLegacyGALDialog
Value: 1 (enable)

Nearly giving up after hours of digging through the API and searching, I was provided some help via Dmitry Streblechenko on StackOverflow (thank you, Dmitry!).

In the end, I ended up with a simple VBS and registry key:

LaunchGALProperties.vbs

If WScript.Arguments.Count = 2 Then                 Dim objOutlook : Set objOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")                 Dim objNamespace : Set objNamespace = objOutlook.GetNamespace("MAPI")                                 objNamespace.CreateRecipient(WScript.Arguments(1)).AddressEntry.Details()                                 Set objOutlook = Nothing                 Set objNamespace = Nothing End If

LaunchGALProperties.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync\SessionManager\Apps\{4C13AA00-01F0-428C-B582-38E4F726D97E}] "Name"="Outlook Properties" "ApplicationType"=dword:00000000 "SessionType"=dword:00000000 "ExtensibleMenu"="ConversationWindowRightClick;MainWindowRightClick;MainWindowActions;ConversationWindowActions;ContactCardMenu" "ApplicationInstallPath"="C:\\\\windows\\\\System32\\\\wscript.exe" "Path"="C:\\\\windows\\\\System32\\\\wscript.exe C:\\\\temp\\\\LaunchGALProp\\\\LaunchGALProperties.vbs \"%user-id%\" \"%contact-id%\""

Boom!  After restarting Skype for Business, I was treated with the following view:

It's quite unfortunate that Microsoft removed this functionality within the newer versions of the Lync/Skype clients, but at least with a little bit of elbow grease I was able to recover it...for now.

UPDATE 04/29/2019:

It appears that the "wscript" command is no longer working (for some reason).  I was able to workaround this by creating a C# project with the following source code:

Program.cs

using System; namespace LaunchGALProps { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { if(args.Length == 2) { dynamic objApp; dynamic objNamespace; objApp = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetTypeFromProgID("Outlook.Application")); objNamespace = objApp.GetNamespace("MAPI"); objNamespace.CreateRecipient(args[1]).AddressEntry.Details(); } } } }

If you do not have Visual Studio installed, but you DO have .NET v4+ installed, you can compile the application like so:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\v4.0.30319\csc.exe /out:LaunchGALProps.exe Program.cs

After my program was compiled, I was able to update my registry key values for ApplicationInstallPath and Path -- once this was done everything was working again.