Parameters

When you install Lync Server 2010 your users are only allowed to exchange instant messages and presence information among themselves: by default, they can only communicate with other people who have SIP accounts in your Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). In addition, users are not allowed to access Lync Server over the Internet; instead, they must be logged on to your internal network before they will be able to log on to Lync Server.

That might be sufficient to meet your communication needs. If it doesn’t meet your needs you can use external access policies to extend the ability of your users to communicate and collaborate. External access policies can grant (or revoke) the ability of your users to do any or all of the following:

1. Communicate with people who have SIP accounts with a federated organization. Note that enabling federation alone will not provide users with this capability. Instead, you must enable federation and then assign users an external access policy that gives them the right to communicate with federated users.

2. Communicate with people who have SIP accounts with a public instant messaging service such as MSN.

3. Access Lync Server over the Internet, without having to first log on to your internal network. This enables your users to use Microsoft Lync 2010 and log on to Lync Server from an Internet café or other remote location.

When you install Lync Server, a global external access policy is automatically created for you. In addition to the global policy, you can also create custom external access policies at either the site or the per-user scope. If you create an external access policy at the site scope, that policy will automatically be assigned to the site upon creation. If you create an external access policy at the per-user scope, that policy will be created but will not be assigned to any users. To assign the policy to a user or group of users, use the Grant-CsExternalAccessPolicy cmdlet.

New external access policies can be created by using New-CsExternalAccessPolicy. Note that these policies can only be created at the site or the per-user scope; you cannot create a new policy at the global scope. In addition, you can have only one external access policy per site: if the Redmond site already has been assigned an external access policy you cannot create a second policy for the site.

Who can run this cmdlet: By default, members of the following groups are authorized to run the New-CsExternalAccessPolicy cmdlet locally: RTCUniversalServerAdmins. To return a list of all the role-based access control (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:

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

None. New-CsExternalAccessPolicy does not accept pipelined input.

Creates new instances of the Microsoft.Rtc.Management.WritableConfig.Policy.ExternalAccess.ExternalAccessPolicy object.

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

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New-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity site:Redmond -EnableFederationAccess $True -EnableOutsideAccess $True

The command shown in Example 1 creates a new external access policy that has the Identity site:Redmond; upon creation, this policy will automatically be assigned to the Redmond site. Note that this new policy sets both the EnableFederationAccess and the EnableOutsideAccess properties to True.

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

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$x = New-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity RedmondAccessPolicy -InMemory $x.EnableFederationAccess = $True $x.EnablePublicCloudAccess = $True $x.EnableOutsideAccess = $True Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Instance $x

Example 2 demonstrates the use of the InMemory parameter; this parameter enables you to create an in-memory-only instance of an external access policy. After it has been created, you can modify the in-memory-only instance, then use the Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy cmdlet to transform the virtual policy into a real external access policy.

To do this, the first command in the example uses New-CsExternalAccessPolicy and the InMemory parameter to create a virtual policy with the Identity RedmondAccessPolicy; this virtual policy is stored in a variable named $x. The next three commands are used to modify three properties of the virtual policy: EnableFederationAccess, EnablePublicCloudAccess, and the EnableOutsideAccess. Finally, the last command uses Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy to create an actual per-user external access policy with the Identity RedmondAccessPolicy. If you do not call Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy, then the virtual policy will disappear as soon as you end your Windows PowerShell session or delete the variable $x. Should that happen, an external access policy with the Identity RedmondAccessPolicy will never be created.

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