Edge Servers

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.

The Office Communications Server perimeter network is home to three edge services, each of which handles a particular type of traffic across the corporate firewall:

• The Access Edge service, formerly known as the Access Proxy, handles all SIP traffic crossing the corporate firewall. The Access Edge service is required for all external user scenarios, including conferencing, remote user access, federation, and public IM connectivity.

• The Web Conferencing Edge service proxies Persistent Shared Object Model (PSOM) traffic between the Web Conferencing Server and external clients. External conference traffic must be authorized by the Web Conferencing Edge service before it is forwarded to the Web Conferencing Server. The Web Conferencing Edge service requires that external clients use TLS connections and obtain a conference session key.

• The A/V Edge service provides a single trusted connection point through which audio and video traffic enters and exits your network. With an A/V Edge service, users can:

  • Add audio and video data to meetings with external participants.

  • Share audio and video directly with an external user (point-to-point).

  • Share their desktop with external users through the Application Sharing Server.

  • The A/V Edge service also handles audio for Enterprise Voice for external users.

For information about edge server configurations and topologies, see Planning for External User Access in the Planning and Architecture documentation.

To enable conferencing with outside users, you must deploy an HTTP reverse proxy in your perimeter network. The reverse proxy manages distribution-group expansion, address book file download, and access to meeting content (such as slides) for outside users, as well as client and device software updates.

The following figure shows a generic deployment of edge servers in the Office Communications Server perimeter network.

Figure 1. Generic Edge Server deployment