Lync Federation and Public IM

Lync Online supports federation with other organizations that use either Lync Online or Lync on-premise. Federated contacts can see each other’s presence, and can use IM, peer-to-peer audio, and video to communicate. As with an on-premise deployment, federation needs to be configured by both parties, and public DNS configuration is required. Whitelists and blacklists are also available to control which domains are available for federation. One difference between the federation features of Lync Online and Lync on-premise is that file transfer is not available with Lync Online federated connections.

In addition to Lync federation, Lync Online users can communicate with contacts that use Skype. However, federation with AOL and Yahoo!, as well as federation with XMPP networks, is not available for Lync Online.