• Article

Enabling and Configuring Anonymous Participation in Meetings

Topic Last Modified: 2009-03-04

Anonymous participation in meetings enables anonymous users, that is, users whose identity is verified through the meeting or conference key only, to join your meetings. By default, all users are disallowed from inviting anonymous users to participate in a meeting. You control who can invite anonymous users by setting options at three levels:

  • On the Edge Server, you specify whether to allow incoming remote access connections and whether to allow anonymous users to join meetings. To specify whether to allow incoming remote access connections and anonymous participation, see Enabling and Configuring Remote User Access. If you configured this functionality when you deployed your Edge Servers, you do not need to do so again, unless you want to change the option.
  • At the global level, you specify the policy to be applied:
    • Allow all users in your organization to invite anonymous users to participate in meetings.
    • Block all users in your organization from inviting anonymous users.
    • Allow anonymous participation for your entire organization or on a per-user basis.
      Use the procedure later in this section to specify the global policy.
  • At the user account level, if you set the global level policy to control anonymous participation on a per-user basis, only the user accounts for which you enable this support can invite anonymous participants. If you set the global level policy to control anonymous participation on a per-user basis, use the information in Allowing or Disallowing Invitation of Anonymous Participants to Meetings by Individual Users to enable specific users to invite anonymous participants.

To configure the global policy for anonymous participation in meetings

  1. Log on to an Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition server or a server with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 installed as a member of the RTCUniversalServerAdmins group or a group with equivalent user rights.

  2. Open the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 snap-in.

  3. In the console tree, right-click the forest node, click Properties, and then click Global Properties.

  4. Click the Meetings tab.

  5. In the Anonymous participants drop-down list box, click the global policy that you want to enforce:

    • Allow users to invite anonymous participants. This policy allows all users in your organization to invite anonymous users to meetings.
    • Disallow users from inviting anonymous participants. This policy prevents all users in your organization from inviting anonymous users to meetings.
    • Enforce per user. This policy enables you to configure individual user accounts to invite anonymous users. All other users are prevented from inviting anonymous users.

  6. If an appropriate global meeting policy has not been assigned, you can configure one as follows:

    • Under Policy Settings, in the Global policy drop-down list box, click the name of the policy that you want to use for meetings.
    • To view or modify a policy, under Policy definition, click the name of the policy, click Edit, modify the policy, as appropriate, and then click OK.

    Note

    For details about the Global policy and policy definition, see Configuring Meeting Policies.