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 people who have SIP accounts in your Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). In addition, users are not allowed to access Lync Server 2010 over the Internet; instead, they must be logged on to your internal network before they will be able to log on to Lync Server 2010.

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 2010 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 2010 from an Internet café or other remote location.

After an external access policy has been created, you can use the Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy cmdlet to change the property values of that policy. For example, by default the global policy does not allow users to communicate with people who have accounts with a federated organization. If you would like to grant this capability to all of your users you can call Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy and set the value of the global policy’s EnableFederationAccess property to True.

Who can run this cmdlet: By default, members of the following groups are authorized to run the Set-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:

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

Microsoft.Rtc.Management.WritableConfig.Policy.ExternalAccess.ExternalAccessPolicy object. Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy accepts pipelined input of the external access policy object.

Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy does not return a value or object. Instead, the cmdlet configures instances of the Microsoft.Rtc.Management.WritableConfig.Policy.ExternalAccess.ExternalAccessPolicy object.

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

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Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Identity RedmondExternalAccessPolicy -EnableFederationAccess $True

The command shown in Example 1 modifies the per-user external access policy that has the Identity RedmondExternalAccessPolicy. In this example, the command changes the value of the EnableFederationAccess property to True.

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

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Get-CsExternalAccessPolicy | Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy -EnableFederationAccess $True

In Example 2, federation access is enabled for all the external access policies configured for use in the organization. To do this, the command first calls Get-CsExternalAccessPolicy without any parameters; this returns a collection of all the external policies currently configured for use. That collection is then piped to Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy, which changes the value of the EnableFederationAccess property for each policy in the collection.

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

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Get-CsExternalAccessPolicy -Filter tag:* | Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy -EnableFederationAccess $True

The preceding example enables federation access for all the external access policies that have been configured at the per-user scope. To carry out this task, the first thing the command does is use Get-CsExternalAcessPolicy and the Filter parameter to return a collection of all the policies that have been configured at the per-user scope. (The filter value "tag:*" limits returned data to policies that have an Identity that begins with the string value "tag:". Any policy with an Identity that begins with "tag:" has been configured at the per-user scope.) The filtered collection is then piped to Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy, which modifies the EnableFederationAccess property for each policy in the collection.

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

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Get-CsExternalAccessPolicy | Where-Object {$_.EnablePublicCloudAccess -eq $True} | Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy -EnableFederationAccess $True

In Example 4, federation access is enabled for all the external access policies that allow public cloud access. To do this, the command first uses Get-CsExternalAccessPolicy to return a collection of all the external access policies currently configured for use in the organization. This collection is piped to the Where-Object cmdlet, which picks out only those policies where the EnablePublicCloudAccess property is equal to True. The filtered collection is then piped to Set-CsExternalAccessPolicy, which takes each policy and sets the EnableFederationAccess property to True. The net result: all external access policies that allow public cloud access will also allow federation access.

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