When I made the decision to use Office 365 one of the drivers for this decision was getting to use Lync under my own domain. The benefit of being able to use a single account for ease of reach now that Lync and Skype are federated along with the ability to archive conversations in my Exchange account were just too good to pass up.

Setting up Lync was a seemless process, but I was not able to communicate with anyone outside of my own domain, and talking to myself tends to get boring after a while. Not being a Lync guy I had to do so

me digging to figure out what the right settings were to enable the federation with external domain.

From the Admin drop down select the Lync menu. Once in the Lync admin center select the organization menu on the left nav. Once in the organization menu you will select the external communication tab. Here you will be able to set external access. For my purposes I have opted to enable “On except for blocked domains” as I want to be able to communicat with anyone. If I were in an organization that I wanted to limit communications between specific domains I would select the “On only for selected domains”.

The other option that can be set here is the public IM connectivity setting that will allow Lync users to communicate with Skype users and other public Instant Message providers supported by Office 365.

The set of options here is what domains you want to block if following the open model, or what domains to allow communications with if you are using the restrictive model.

Once these options are set active users should log out and log back to take advantage of the new permissions.

Happy Lync’ing!