In-band provisioning

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One of my customers recently asked me about group policies and Office Communicator. With Lync 2010 these traditional group policy settings are now accomplished via in-band provisioning or server-based client policies. Keep in mind there are still some group policy settings that are still required for bootstrapping but beyond that we have moved to server-side provisioning. Lync client provisioning is done via powershell cmdlets or by using the Lync Server Control Panel.

Most of the CSClientPolicy parameters correspond to the OCS 2007 R2 Group policy settings.

In-band provisioning settings that are server-based provide a consistent end-user experience for people who are not joined to the campus domain, or who join using devices or remote clients. This helps management in our schools that have a huge portion of the workstations as unmanaged. As a plus these settings are taken immediately vs. logout and login again.

Lots of policies can be set including:

AudioVideoBirate

AllowCallForwarding

EnableP2PVideo

IM archiving

Calendar State Publication

DisableFreeBusyInfo,

etc.

I started to research in-band provisioning and did find an article by one of my peers here. Thanks Daniel!