I have a scenario where there is a central office and several branch offices; there is already Active Directory in place, and each branch office has its local domain controller (no problems here).
The customer wants to deploy Lync Server 2010, together with the Lync client on each workstation. The plan is to deploy Lync front-end servers only in the central office, and have all clients connect to them.
The catch is, there is absolutely no routing between the branch offices; they are not meant to directly talk to each other, only with the central office.
Now, as everyone knows, Lync clients are only managed by the Lync servers, but talk directly between themselves for actual communications; unless of course a conference is involved, in which case they connect all to the front-end servers which acts as a MCU.
In this scenario, where there is no connectivity between branch offices, will two Lync clients in two different offices be able to talk to each other? Will they automatically fall back to connecting through the front-end servers, or will they just refuse to connect at all?
Best Answer
This can be done with an Edge server. Once a Lync front-end is deployed you can rollout an edge server. This will allow for a number of things federation with other Lync users, connectivity to external IM services like AIM, MSN and Jabber/XMPP clients, as well as external access for users.
Here is the MS deployment guide: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11379