Topic Last Modified: 2011-01-27

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 your meetings. By default, all users are prevented from inviting anonymous users to participate in a meeting. You control who can invite anonymous users by configuring a conferencing policy to support anonymous users, and applying that conferencing policy to specific users.

Use the procedure in this section to configure a global policy to support participation of anonymous users in conferences. For details about creating and applying a conferencing policy to support participation of anonymous users in conferences, see Create or Modify Conferencing User Experience for a Site or Group of Users and Apply Conferencing Policies to Support Anonymous Users in the Deployment documentation or the Operations documentation.

To configure policies to allow anonymous participation in meetings

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. In the left navigation bar, click External User Access.

  4. In the Access Edge Configuration page, click the global policy, click Edit, and then click Show details.

  5. In Edit Access Edge Configuration, select the Enable anonymous user access to conferences check box.

  6. Click Commit.

  7. In the left navigation bar, click Conferencing, and then do one of the following:

    1. To create a new site policy, click New, and then click Site policy. In Select a Site, click the appropriate site from the list and then click OK.

    2. To configure an existing policy, click the appropriate policy listed in the table, click Edit, then Show details.

  8. In Conferencing Policies, select the Allow participants to invite anonymous users check box.

  9. Click Commit.

To enable users to invite anonymous users to conferences, you must also enable support for anonymous users in your organization. For details, see Enable or Disable Anonymous User Access for Your Organization in the Deployment documentation or the Operations documentation.

Additionally, you must apply the policy to users that you want to be able to invite anonymous users. For details, see Apply External User Access Policies to Users in the Deployment documentation or the Operations documentation.