Enhanced Federation

Enhanced federation lifts a security limit imposed within dynamic federation in which an Edge Server will accept only up to 20 SIP messages each second from a partner’s Edge Server. This is a reasonable limit for many organizations, and it helps prevent a partner’s Edge Server from overwhelming a business’s own Edge Server and possibly impacting other services such as remote access.

Enabling enhanced federation for a domain removes this “20 messages per second” limit for the specified partner’s SIP domain, but this obviously requires some form of administrator configuration. Organizations should identify partners they will federate with and plan to enable enhanced federation with those partners. Edge Servers will log events indicating which partner SIP domains are using dynamic federation so that Lync administrators can proactively monitor those lists and enable enhanced federation as required. In terms of configuration, enabling enhanced federation for a domain is a matter of simply specifying the partner’s SIP domain name but leaving the Access Edge service field empty. Specifying the Access Edge FQDN is required only for direct federation, discussed in the next section. The SRV records published to public DNS for a SIP domain are instead used to locate the partner’s Access Edge FQDN.