Managing Public Providers

Similar to managing federation, the Public IM providers can be allowed or blocked when configuring an Edge Server. By default, all the included providers are disabled and must be enabled before users can communicate with contacts in these domains.

The following additional options are available when dealing with the Public IM providers:

• Allow Communications Only with Users Verified by This Provider—This is the default setting and it means the Edge Server trusts the Public IM provider’s determination of valid or invalid users trying to send messages to the Lync Server users.

• Allow Communications Only with Users on Recipients’ Contact Lists—This setting limits communication only to users explicitly added to the contact list of a Lync Server user. If a contact who is not added tries to initiate a conversation with an internal user, the message is rejected by the Edge Server.

• Allow All Communications with This Provider—This setting enables all incoming communication from the provider regardless of whether the provider indicates that the message should be trusted.

To manage access to the public networks, use the following steps:

1. Open the Lync Server Control Panel.

2. Select Federation and External User Access in the navigation pane.

3. Click SIP Federated Providers.

4. Highlight one of the providers, click Edit, and click Show Details.

5. Check the Enable Communications with This Provider box, and click Commit.

6. Repeat for enabling additional providers.

Figure 6.8 displays the default Public IM configuration for a Lync Server 2013 deployment.

Figure 6.8. Configuring Public IM providers.

To perform these steps in the Lync Server Management Shell, use the following command:

Set-CSPublicProvider <Provider Name> -Enabled $true

To enable all three public IM providers in one step, use the following command:

Get-CSPublicProvider | Set-CSPublicProvider –Enabled $true

You can view the status of the public IM providers by running the Get-CSPublicProvider cmdlet. The following is the output is from the command: