Your organization’s support team may decide to create a federated relationship with other companies. A federated relationship is a virtual alliance that enables identification and authorization across organizational boundaries.
In this article
What is federation?
Lync Online federation lets you communicate faster and more effectively with others outside your organization, such as partners, suppliers, customers, or vendors.
When enabled, federation allows you to:
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Add users from other organizations to your Contacts list.
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Send instant messages to your federated contacts.
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Invite contacts to audio calls, video calls, or conferences.
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Exchange presence information.
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Escalate person-to-person instant messages to multi-person conferences.
Lync Online also supports federation with the Microsoft Messenger public instant messaging (IM) provider.
Note: Some of these features might not be available to you, depending on your account’s configuration.
Which features are available?
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Lync conferencing is available to federated and non-federated users. However, by default, your invitees cannot join a meeting as presenters, if the option is enabled for internal employees only. If you need to give presenter permission to an external participant, you can promote them to presenters during the meeting.
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Federated users can participate in IM conversations and access presence information, as well as participate in web conferences and audio/video conferences.
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Microsoft Messenger users can view presence status and participate in peer-to-peer IM conversations as well as peer-to-peer audio/video calls.
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Some features, such as file transfer and application sharing, are not available to public IM users.
|
Features |
Federated User |
Public IM User |
|
Presence |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Peer-to-peer IM |
Yes |
Yes |
|
IM conferencing |
Yes |
No |
|
Collaboration (such as screen- or PowerPoint-sharing) |
Yes |
No |
|
Peer-to-peer audio/video communications |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Audio/video conferencing |
Yes |
No |
|
File transfer |
Yes |
No |
