Manage Communications with External Users

 

Topic Last Modified: 2011-02-03

By default, no policies are configured to support external user access, including remote user access, federated user access, even if you have already enabled external user access support for your organization. To control the use of external user access, you must configure one or more policies, specifying the type of external user access supported for each policy. This includes the following external access policies:

  • Global policy   The global policy is created when you deploy your Edge Servers. By default, no external user access options are enabled in the global policy. To support external user access at the global level, you configure the global policy to support one or more types of external user access options. The global policy applies to all users in your organization, but site policies and user policies override the global policy. If you delete the global policy, you do not remove it. Instead, you reset it to the default setting.

  • Site policy   You can create and configure one or more site policies to limit support for external user access to specific sites. The configuration in the site policy overrides the global policy, but only for the specific site covered by the site policy. For example, if you enable remote user access in the global policy, you might specify a site policy that disables remote user access for a specific site. By default, a site policy is applied to all users of that site, but you can assign a user policy to a user to override the site policy setting.

  • User policy   You can create and configure one or more user policies to limit support for remote user access to specific users. The configuration in the user policy overrides the global and site policy, but only for the specific users to whom the user policy is assigned. For example, if you enable remote user access in the global policy and site policy, you might specify a user policy that disables remote user access and then assign that user policy to specific users. If you create a user policy, you must apply it to one or more users before it takes effect.

To support participation by anonymous users in conferences, you must configure a conferencing policy and assign the policy to users. Assigning a conferencing policy in which anonymous participation is enabled to users or user groups enables those users to invite anonymous users to conferences that they host.

In addition to external user access policies and conferencing policies, some external user access options, including access by federated users and access by public users, require configuration of other options. This includes the following:

  • Specifying allowed and blocked domains for federated partners, in addition to any specific servers running the Access Edge service that you want to allow or block.

  • Specifying which specific service providers your organization supports, including the name of the server running the Access Edge service and the verification level supported for the provider.