Monitor and Control Federated Partner Access

[This is pre-release documentation and subject to change in future releases. This topic's current status is: Milestone-Ready]

Topic Last Modified: 2010-04-08

If you have configured support for federated partners, such as specific external organizations, you need to actively manage the external domains that can communicate with the servers in your organization. Communications Server 2010 provides mechanisms to facilitate the tracking and control of federated domain connections.

An administrator can review the list on the Federated Domains page in the Communications Server Control Panel and take appropriate action, which can be any of the following:

Leave the list as is.
Configure the specific domain as an allowed domain. If partner discovery is not enabled, do this if the domain is a federated partner and might need to communicate with more than 1,000 of your users or might need to send more than 20 messages per second.
Block the federated domain from connecting to your organization. To do this, configure the domain as a blocked domain.

To configure an external domain as an allowed domain

Open Communications Server Control Panel.
Click Federated Domains, click New, and then click Allowed domain.

In New Federated Domains, do the following:

In Domain name (or FQDN), type the name of the federated partner domain.

Note:
This name must be unique, should not already exist as an allowed domain for this Access Edge service. The name cannot exceed 256 characters in length. The search on the federated partner domain name performs a suffix match. For example, if you type contoso.com, the search will also return the domain it.contoso.com. A federated partner domain cannot simultaneously be blocked and allowed. Communications Server 2010 prevents this from happening so that you do not have to synch up your lists.

Note:

This name must be unique, should not already exist as an allowed domain for this Access Edge service. The name cannot exceed 256 characters in length.

The search on the federated partner domain name performs a suffix match. For example, if you type contoso.com, the search will also return the domain it.contoso.com.

A federated partner domain cannot simultaneously be blocked and allowed. Communications Server 2010 prevents this from happening so that you do not have to synch up your lists.

(Optional) In Comment, type information that you want to share with other system administrators about this configuration.

Click Commit.
Repeat steps 2 through 4 for each federated partner that you want to allow.

To configure an external domain as a blocked domain

Open Communications Server Control Panel.
Click Federated Domains, click New, and then click Blocked domain.

In New Federated Domains, do the following:

In Domain name (or FQDN), type the name of the federated partner domain that you want to block.

Note:
The name cannot exceed 256 characters in length. The search on the federated partner domain name performs a suffix match. For example, if you type contoso.com, the search will also return the domain it.contoso.com. A federated partner domain cannot simultaneously be blocked and allowed. Communications Server 2010 prevents this from happening so that you do not have to synch up your lists.

Note:

The name cannot exceed 256 characters in length.

The search on the federated partner domain name performs a suffix match. For example, if you type contoso.com, the search will also return the domain it.contoso.com.

A federated partner domain cannot simultaneously be blocked and allowed. Communications Server 2010 prevents this from happening so that you do not have to synch up your lists.

(Optional) In Comment, type information that you want to share with other system administrators about this configuration.

Click Commit.
Repeat steps 2 through 4 for each federated partner that you want to block.