Topic Last Modified: 2013-02-13

Federation between Microsoft Lync Server 2013, Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server supports peer-to-peer and multi-party communications. Peer-to-peer conversations can be escalated to multi-party conversations, allowing for ad hoc meetings. Meetings – Web conferencing or audio/visual conferences – can be scheduled to include contacts inside your organization as well as contacts in partners that you federate with.

Federation first appeared in Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 and supported one kind of federation, Direct Federation. Direct Federation required you to know the federation partner’s session initiation protocol (SIP) domain and the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the partner’s Edge Server. Live Communications Server 2005 with SP1 introduced additional federation types, all of which required domain name system (DNS) SRV records to be published by the federated partner to locate their Edge Server. The terminology for that release was:

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 introduced updated naming for federation types to better define what each federation type actually accomplished:

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 introduced a narrower definition of Hosting Provider in accordance with Microsoft Lync Online 2010 and Microsoft Office 365 and also made it subject to the same allowed list defined by the Allowed Partner Domain federation type.

Enabling federation between Microsoft Lync Server 2013, Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server uses the Edge Servers and reverse proxies to enforce the rules and allowed partner domains that you define. From a planning perspective, federating with other Lync Server, Office Communications Server requires the following:

The following information will aid you in defining the certificate, port/protocol and DNS requirements for federation with Microsoft Lync Server 2013 and Lync Server 2010.

Planning for certificates, firewall and port/protocol requirements and DNS requirements is generally a straight forward process if you have planned or deployed your Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Edge Servers. Because federation is an additional feature that uses the existing Edge Server, the planning requirements are generally met by the Edge Server planning and deployment. You should use the following tables to determine that your requirements are met and make changes in port/protocol and DNS accordingly.

Important:
If you have a pool of Edge Servers and are federating with Lync Server 2013 or Lync Server 2010 partners, then you can use either DNS load balancing or hardware load balancers on the internal and external facing sides of the Edge Servers. If you are federating with Office Communications Server 2007 or Office Communications Server 2007 R2, hardware load balancing will provide failover support in the event of an Edge Server. Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 are not DNS load balancing aware. The partner Edge Servers will establish communication with the first Edge Server in your pool that responds. If that Edge Server fails, communication does not automatically failover.

Certificate requirements are typically met through the planning of certificates for your chosen Edge Server or pooled Edge Server plan.

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