Enable or Disable Anonymous User Access for Your Organization

Topic Last Modified: 2010-12-15

Anonymous users are users who do not have a user account in your organization's Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) or in a supported federated domain, can be invited to participate remotely in an on-premises conference. By allowing anonymous participation in meetings you enable anonymous users (that is, users whose identity is verified through the meeting or conference key only) to join meetings. Allowing anonymous participation requires enabling it for your organization.

If you later want to temporarily or permanently prevent access by anonymous users, you can disable it for your organization. Use the procedure in this section to enable or disable anonymous user access for your organization.

Note:
Enabling anonymous user access for your organization only specifies that your servers running the Access Edge service support access by anonymous users. Anonymous users cannot participate in any meetings in your organization until you also configure at least one conferencing policy and apply it to one or more users or user groups. The only users that can invite anonymous users to meetings are those users that are assigned a conferencing policy that is configured to support anonymous users. For details about configuring conferencing policies to support anonymous users, see Configure Conferencing Policies to Support Anonymous Users in the Deployment documentation or the Operations documentation.

Note:

Enabling anonymous user access for your organization only specifies that your servers running the Access Edge service support access by anonymous users. Anonymous users cannot participate in any meetings in your organization until you also configure at least one conferencing policy and apply it to one or more users or user groups. The only users that can invite anonymous users to meetings are those users that are assigned a conferencing policy that is configured to support anonymous users. For details about configuring conferencing policies to support anonymous users, see Configure Conferencing Policies to Support Anonymous Users in the Deployment documentation or the Operations documentation.

To enable or disable anonymous user access for your organization

From a user account that is a member of the RTCUniversalServerAdmins group (or has equivalent user rights), or is assigned to the CsAdministrator role, log on to any computer in your internal deployment.
Open a browser window, and then enter the Admin URL to open the Lync Server Control Panel. For details about the different methods you can use to start Lync Server Control Panel, see Open Lync Server Administrative Tools.
In the left navigation bar, click External User Access, and then click Access Edge Configuration.
On the Access Edge Configuration page, click Global, click Edit, and then click Show details.
In Edit Access Edge Configuration, do one of the following:
- To enable anonymous user access for your organization, select the Enable communications with anonymous users check box.
- To disable anonymous user access for your organization, clear the Enable communications with anonymous users check box.
Click Commit.

To enable anonymous users to participate in conferences hosted by users in your Lync Server 2010 deployment, you must also configure and assign at least one conferencing policy to support anonymous users. For details, see Configure Conferencing Policies to Support Anonymous Users in the Deployment documentation or the Operations documentation.