I am currently on Lync2010 on premise, Enterprise, full redundancy, FE, DIR, Edge, Mediation. We are running Open Federation and communicate everyday with hundreds of partners.

The question has been posed to me on finding a way to enable a cross federation AddressBook. I have seen that there are cloud services like NextPlane, which will provide the ability to synchronize users to a directory for federated partners to use.

Of course there is the option of managing contact of external contact with SIP addresses, but I prefer to avoid this.

Are there other options for establishing a shared UC address book with federated partners? Does S4B provide this functionality? IF both federated partners sync'd their directory to azure, could that be used?

What options are available now?

Thanks!

Tom.

Hi Tom,

To make the two GALs include contact info from remote organization, you have to create corresponding objects in local AD to reflect the remote mail recipients/groups.

Microsoft provided solutions on this. IIFP/MIIS/ILM/FIM (they are actually pretty similar products) got builtin component called "GALSync", which pumps objects from source Active Directory into SQL database, and later on you can leverage the metadata to create objects in another Active Directory.

Theres a step by step guide for your reference.

https://techontip.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/enable-external-galsync-contacts-for-lync-address-book/

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Best regards,

Eric