When You Need a Web Conferencing Edge Server

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

If you want external users to participate in your internal conference meetings, you must deploy a Web Conferencing Edge Server.

The Web Conferencing Edge Server permits external users to join on-premise meetings by using the Live Meeting 2007 client. When your organization deploys a Web Conferencing Edge Server, internal users can invite remote users to meetings, including users from a federated domain (federated users) or other external users (anonymous users, who do not have an Active Directory identity in your organization or in a domain that is federated with your organization).

Enterprise users and federated users are authenticated by their Active Directory credentials. Anonymous users are authenticated using a per-meeting conference key provided to them inside the invitation conference organizers send. All recipients of an e-mail containing a conference key are authenticated using the same conference key. For more information about anonymous users, see the Introduction to the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Technical Overview.