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Could someone please clarify what the situation is on federating with organations outside Office 365 service? At the moment I getting confusing messages on whether we can or can't do this on the Office 365 platform. All the information I've read so far is suggesting that you can however I've not been able to do this to date.
If we can't, will the capability be available at a later stage in the beta program, as we see this as a must have if we are to move over to online services?
Thanks
Alistair
All,
Over the last couple of weeks we were experiencing issues with federation to other organizations and PIC. These issues have been resolved earlier in the week and we expect a lot of the earlier reported issues are no longer occurring. If you can please help us verify, that would be greatly appreciated.
If you are still having issues with federation, here are a couple of other items that I hope will help:
Federation with Microsoft:
At this time Microsoft is not able to enable federation with Lync Online tenants. This is a known issue with our internal deployment and policies and we are working to address it. At this time I do not have an ETA on when customers will be able to federate with Microsoft, however once it is known we will share with the community.
Enabling Federation for On-Premises deployments (separate SIP domains, inter-organization):
As Steve pointed out in an earlier response, there are some known issues with enabling federation. These are documented in the release notes which can be found by following the below link:
community.office365.com/.../release-notes-for-office-365-beta-for-enterprises-english.aspx.
If you are using a vanity domain, and you are still experience issues, please validate the requisite SRV records are properly created in your external DNS servers.
Enabling Federation for On-Premises deployments (same SIP domains, intra-organization):
This functionality is not available in this release of Lync Online. Federation will only work when the on-premises SIP domain is different than the Online SIP domain.
I hope this post helps clarify questions around Federation. If not, please let me know.
Best Regards,
Shawn Mahan
Lync Online TAP Program Manager
During the beta I can verify that Federation to other Live IDs, other Office 365 Beta companies, and AD Federated On-premises contacts do work. I have seen some issues with the time it takes for Live IDs to become fully funtional. I have not seen any scenarios were federating to a contact that is not one of the above listed works during the beta.
If you are having specific issues federating Lync contacts outside your Beta Company I would recommend calling support and opening a service request.
Other things you may check if having issues with Federation:
1. verify that Domain federation and Public IM Connectivity are correctly configured in the Microsoft Online Portal (Your Administration Center)
2. Verify that Domain federation is enabled on the other company as well.
* Public IM Connectivity does require Windows Live Messenger. AOL Instant messenger (AIM) and Yahoo! Messenger are not supported.
What I was looking to have verified, is it possible to federate with on premises OCS or Lync organisations? Since I've written the initial post I've found out that this is not possible in the beta but will be available when Office 365 goes GA. Is this correct? Or will it become available earlier?
Following on from this, and re-iterating what Alistair has posted, MCS confirmed that federation from Lync Online is limited to Live services (e.g Live.co.uk, hotmail.com etc) and with other Lync Online tenants. It's not possible to federate with Microsoft or Lync Server users (i.e. Lync On-Premise configurations)
If this is not accurate and is mis-information, I would appreciate an actual confirmation of what the correct answer is, rather than ambiguous, non-consistent responses
Justin
We're also attemping the same - with MS directly. Not as clear as we'd like either. Any news?
Does that mean it will not possible to federate with MS and/or on premise Lync Server users during current beta or all the time also at GA?
When this (Lync Onpremise federation) is not possible in general this does not make sense to large companies having online and onpremise users.
There is a section in the release notes that talks about some of the issues related to federating with an On-premises Lync 2010 Server.
community.office365.com/.../release-notes-for-office-365-beta-for-enterprises-english.aspx
I also looked up the Office 365 beta service description and it states federation to an on-premises Lync 2010 server is supported. There are some limits to the functionality but you should be able to get federation to work.
Link to Office 365 Beta Service description:
www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx
If you are having issues with establishing federation between your On-premises Lync 2010 Server and Office 365 Lync, i would recommend contacting support.
This thread hasn't been updated in quite some time. I have Microsoft federated with my Online Lync; however, I have a question regarding federating with my on-premise OCS 2007 R2... is there some dns configuration necessary so that tennant.onmicrosoft.com is a recognized domain?
Also, above link goes to a note page, navigating the links to the release notes only shows 3 issues for Lync. It would be helpful to have issue numbers in the release-notes text associated with each entry, then as changes are made it will be clear what is being referred to.
Please see my other post here: community.office365.com/.../1392.aspx
Federation is working between tenants, between Lync and OCS 2007 and OCS 2007 R2 Onpremise.
Please see page 16 of the Lync Online Service description - which has a nice overview about the topic:
Regards,
Tim Bosinius
TSP Office 365