Parameters

Role-based access control (RBAC) enables administrators to delegate control of specific management tasks in Microsoft Lync Server 2010. For example, instead of granting your organization’s help desk full administrator privileges you can give these employees very specific rights: the right to manage only user accounts; the right to manage only Enterprise Voice components; the right to manage only archiving and Archiving Server. In addition, these rights can be limited in scope: someone can be given the right to manage Enterprise Voice, but only in the Redmond site; someone else can be given the right to manage users, but only if those user accounts are in the Finance organizational unit (OU).

The Lync Server 2010 implementation of RBAC is based on two key elements: Active Directory security groups and Windows PowerShell cmdlets. When you install Lync Server 2010, a number of universal security groups, such as CsAdministrator, CsArchivingAdministrator, and CsHelpDesk are created for you. These universal security groups have a one-to-one correspondence with RBAC roles; that means that any user who is in the CsArchivingAdministrator security group has all of the rights granted to the CsArchivingAdministrator RBAC role. In turn, the rights granted to an RBAC role are based on the cmdlets assigned to that role (cmdlets can be assigned to multiple RBAC roles). For example, suppose a role has been assigned the following cmdlets:

Get-ArchivingPolicy

Grant-ArchivingPolicy

New-ArchivingPolicy

Remove-ArchivingPolicy

Set-ArchivingPolicy

Get-ArchivingConfiguration

New-ArchivingConfiguration

Remove-ArchivingConfiguration

Set-ArchivingConfiguration

Get-CsUser

Export-CsArchivingData

Get-CsComputer

Get-CsPool

Get-CsService

Get-CsSite

The preceding list represents the only cmdlets that a user assigned a hypothetical RBAC role is allowed to run during a remote Windows PowerShell session. If the user tries to run the Disable-CsUser cmdlet that command will fail because users assigned the hypothetical role do not have the right to run Disable-CsUser. This applies to the Lync Server Control Panel as well. For example, an Archiving administrator cannot disable a user by using the Lync Server Control Panel; that’s because the Lync Server Control Panel abides by RBAC roles. Any time you run a command in Lync Server Control Panel you are actually calling a Windows PowerShell cmdlet. If you are not allowed to run Disable-CsUser, it won’t matter whether you directly run that cmdlet from Windows PowerShell or if you indirectly run the cmdlet from within the Lync Server Control Panel: the command will fail.)

Note that RBAC applies only to remote management. If you are logged on to a computer running Lync Server 2010 and you open Lync Server Management Shell, RBAC roles will not be enforced. Instead, security is enforced primarily through the security groups RTCUniversalServerAdmins; RTCUniversalUserAdmins; and RTCUniversalReadOnlyAdmins.

When you install Lync Server 2010, Setup creates several built-in RBAC roles. These roles cover common administrative areas such as voice administration, user management, and Response Group administration. The built-in roles cannot be modified in any way: you cannot add or remove cmdlets to the roles and you cannot delete these roles. (Any attempt to delete a built-in role will result in an error.) However, you can use the built-in roles to create custom RBAC roles. These custom roles can then be modified by changing the administrative scopes; for example, you could limit the role to managing user accounts in a particular Active Directory OU.

To create a new role, you must first create a universal security group in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) that shares a name with the role; for example to create a new role named DialInConferencingAdministrator, you must create a security group with the SamAccountName DialInConferencingAdministrator. Note that New-CsAdminRole will not create this group for you. If the DialInConferencingAdministrator group does not exist when you call New-CsAdminRole then your command will fail. The Identity you assign to your new role must be the SamAccountName of the corresponding Active Directory group.

After creating the Active Directory security group, you must then select a built-in RBAC role to serve as the template for your new custom role. You cannot create a blank RBAC role by using New-CsAdminRole. Instead, all custom roles must be based on one of the built-in RBAC roles. This means that a custom role must have the same assigned cmdlets as one of the built-in roles. However, you can use Set-CsAdminRole to change the administrative scope of this custom role.

Who can run this cmdlet: By default, members of the following groups are authorized to run the New-CsAdminRole cmdlet locally: RTCUniversalServerAdmins. To return a list of all the RBAC roles this cmdlet has been assigned to (including any custom RBAC roles you have created yourself), run the following command from the Windows PowerShell prompt:

Get-CsAdminRole | Where-Object {$_.Cmdlets –match "New-CsAdminRole"}

None.

New-CsAdminRole creates new instances of the Microsoft.Rtc.Management.WritableConfig.Settings.Roles.Role object.

-------------------------- Example 1 ------------------------

The command in Example 1 duplicates the RBAC role CsVoiceAdministrator. Because no additional parameters are used, the new role -- RedmondVoiceAdministrators -- will be an exact duplicate of CsVoiceAdministrator, which includes both the UserScopes and ConfigScopes properties being set to "global".

-------------------------- Example 2 ------------------------

The preceding command creates a new RBAC role (RedmondVoiceAdministrator) and then configures the role to allow a single user scope: the Redmond OU. To do this, the UserScopes parameter is included along with the following parameter value: "OU:ou=Redmond,dc=litwareinc,dc=com". This parameter value replaces the current value of the UserScopes property with one item: the OU with the distinguished name (DN) "ou=Redmond,dc=litwareinc,dc=com".

-------------------------- Example 3 ------------------------

The command shown in Example 3 is a variation of the command shown in Example 2; the only difference is that, in this example, two OUs are added to the UserScopes property. This is done by assigning a comma-separated list to the Replace method: the two items in the list represent the identifiers for the two OUs (Redmond and Portland) to be assigned to the new RBAC role.

-------------------------- Example 4 ------------------------

In Example 4, the site with the SiteId Redmond is assigned to the ConfigScopes property for a new RBAC role. Note that the syntax for the ConfigScopes property requires the use of the "site:" prefix followed by the value of the SiteId property for the site being added.