Posted on by unixwiz

Skype for Business with macOS Catalina

Today I was troubleshooting issues with a brand new MacBook Air that had the latest version of macOS Catalina on it. The user had installed Skype for Business but the microphone would never work. In the instructions that Microsoft provides, it says that you need to enable it in the Privacy & Security settings, however the Skype for Business Application never shows up under the Microphone settings. This went down a few rabbit holes, but what it appears is that Microsoft has not updated the Skype for Business app to update the TCC database. So what I ended up having to do was the following:

  1. First you need to give the Terminal app full disk access, if you don’t do this, then the rest of the actions will fail. To do this, while you are in the Security and Privacy Preference Panel, find the “Full Disk Access” on the left side, once found click the lock icon to unlock if it isn’t unlocked already and then select the check box next to the Terminal application. It may give you a popup about needing to quit the terminal app because it is open, go ahead and quit the application.
  2. Next, open a new terminal app, it is under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
  3. In the Terminal app, we are going to run 2 commands, the first command is going to backup the file we will be changing with the second command. So the first command we need to run is:
sudo cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db ~/Desktop/

4. Then we are going to run the following command which will insert a new row in to the TCC.db file (this should all be on one line):

sudo sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db "insert into access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone','com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness',0,1,1,NULL,NULL,NULL,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1541440109) ;"

5. Now go back to the Privacy & Security Preference Panel and click the Microphone, the Skype for Business app should show up there, as well has have a check mark next to it, if it doesn’t have the check mark, click it.

6. Then we need to remove the full disk access from Terminal, so scroll back to the Full Disk Access and uncheck the Terminal application. It will give you a popup about it running, go ahead and click the quit now.

7. Now you can either start Skype for Business, or stop and re-open it and the Microphone should work on voice calls now.