Topic Last Modified: 2013-02-21

Deploying an Edge Server or Edge pool is the first step to supporting external users. For details about deploying Edge Servers, see Deploying External User Access in the Deployment documentation. An important consideration for the configuration of policies is to understand the precedence of policies and how the policies are applied. Lync Server policy settings that are applied at one policy level can override settings that are applied at another policy level. Lync Server policy precedence is: User policy (most influence) overrides a Site policy, and then a Site policy overrides a Global policy (least influence). This means that the closer the policy setting is to the object that the policy is affecting, the more influence it has on the object.

After completing the setup of an Edge Server or Edge pool, you must enable the types of external user access that you want to provide, and configure the settings for the external access. In Lync Server 2013, you enable and configure external user access and policies using the Lync Server Control Panel, the Lync Server Management Shell or both, based on the task requirements.

To support external user access, you must do both of the following:

You can configure external user access settings, including any policies that you want to use to control external user access, even if you have not enabled external user access for your organization. However, the policies and other settings that you configure are in effect only when you have external user access enabled for your organization. External users cannot communicate with users of your organization when external user access is disabled or if no external user access policies are configured to support it.

Your edge deployment authenticates the types of external users (except for anonymous users, who are authenticated by the conference ID and a passkey that is sent to the anonymous participant when you create the conference and invite participants) and controls access based on how you configure your edge support. In order to control communications, you can configure one or more policies and configure settings that define how users inside and outside your deployment communicate with each other. The policies and settings include the default global policy for external user access, in addition to site and user policies that you can create and configure to enable one or more types of external user access for specific sites or users.

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