MS Exchange?

Well Microsoft reckon 6-8 weeks for a CD to come and I'm not downloading it on my connection and bandwidth limit so I was gonna download it when I get back to work in september on their connection :D Need a trial of server 2003 to go with it as well actually.

Seen as though you're in a secondary school as well, do you run your mail server as a DC or not? Also, If I install exchange on a test server, will I be able to migrate all the mailboxes and settings to a different server as the server it will eventually go on has another role at the moment? Lastly, any idea on the rough cost of deploying exchange as I can't make any sense of the microsoft page?

Thanks :)

Ben
 
You don't work during the summer in your school?

I do, its when I do the most work!

Right, we have 3 domain controllers and 6 other servers. All 3 of our domain controllers are also global catalog servers. This is so that the Exchange system is still accessible if one of the DCs were to go down for any reason.

Exchange runs on its own dedicated dual xeon server with 2gig ram and fast scsi drives in a raid 5 array.

Exchange for educational usage isn't much really. It was £77 for Exchange Server 2003 standard, and £0.98 per CAL. We spent about £2,300 on the server hardware. I also purchased GFI mail essentials and mail security which are both very good.

Setting Exchange was quite easy. There is a bit of fiddling in IIS needed to get OWA working nicely, but all quite simple.

We use OWA for internal and external usage, but some office and senior staff use in though Outlook 2003 on their office PC.
 
Yeah, that would be great if you don't mind :)

I'm quite pleased about the cost as well- I thought it was going to be running into the thousands :o We've already got a dual 3.0GHz xeon with 2GB RAM connected to a SAN which it will run on so that's all good :D

Is there any tips you can give me on security please as that's the thing which most concerns me even though it is behind a router/firewall and an ISA server? :)

Also out of interest, how do you create your users? At the moment, we use addusers.exe from the win 2000 reskit but I'm not sure whether it can be adjusted so it will also create the users mailbox etc?

Thanks

Ben
 
We only use exchange for staff, so we just right click the user on active directory on the exchange server and create a mailbox.

You can use this way for bulk operations also.

Secury - nothing extra really, we are also behind firewall etc. The external IP to the exchange server IP only has mail ports open, so i've done it in a way that you can't RDP to the server from the outside directly.

Also have set deny to our students security group to the server just in case.

drop me an email at mkapadiaATgreycourt.orgDOTuk with a username and password u want ansd i'll sort it tomorrow morning for you. Infact, if you asre lucky, i'll remote in and do it now lol.
 
Thanks very much mate- much appreciated :cool:

After just having a quick look around it's quite impressive :)

Just a quick question that its brought up though- if you are using mandatory profiles like us, do you redirect the application data folder?
 
Right, just to let you all know i've finally sorted my profile problems :cool: After trying what otacon said and it not working, I decided out of interest to take a look in the registry to see what values were there for outlook before and after it had been run for the first time and I found one called Migrateprefs which I deleted and sent the profile back up and it works fine so thank you to everyone who helped- it was much appreciated :D

Next question- do I need to redirect the app data folder now because if outlook pulls the profile from the server on each logon, it doesn't need the appdata folder to roam does it?

Thanks

Ben
 
Right, nevermind the last question :o I have another two instead...

How can I stop users accessing all of the options menus in outlook?

and

How do I disable the use of public folders?

Thanks

Ben
 
To disable certain menu items in outlook, you need to import the MS Office policy template ADM files to AD, then you can do this via policy.

I assume you know how to do this, but if not, gimme a shout.

Disabling public folders, not too sure as have never done it, but I guess one very crude way of doing it to unmount the public folders database from within Exchange System Manager.
 
Thanks mate :)

I've loaded the files outlk11.adm and office11.adm into the group policy editor but I can't find an option to completley disable the tools menu- do you know if this is possible?

Thanks

Ben
 
Sorry, more questions :o

Exchange doesn't need to be installed on a blank domain does it? I'm just not too sure because the first time I tried to install it it buggered up the AD schema completley so the domain was unusable and since then, its always been on a newly created domain so I'm not sure?

Any ideas on the group policies I'm after?

Thanks

Ben
 
In response to the first post.

Personally if i was in your position i would get some face to face consultation to take you through a possible solution.

Exchange is a tool you can experiment with safely if you are unsure of how to install, configure and administer it.

Your biggest challenge will be using external email addresses for an internal domain system as the MX records for the external domain will belong to your email host.
 
I don't see where an expensive consultation with an 'expert' would get is us if anywhere in fact. We know what we want it to do and I've read and had it explained to me how it will do it.

From what I've been reading as well, we can use a shared calender as a room booking feature which should be useful. I just need to iron out these last few problems, most importantly hiding the tools menu and we'll be sorted.

The name of the internal network as I understand it should have no effect on receiving mail from a different address as long as county will change the MX records for our domain but I'm *hoping* that this will not be a problem :)

So, anybody any ideas on hiding the tools menu in outlook?

Thanks

Ben
 
Trigger said:
I don't see where an expensive consultation with an 'expert' would get is us if anywhere in fact. We know what we want it to do and I've read and had it explained to me how it will do it.
Click to expand...
If you're confident that's good, but make no mistake, Exchange server is a big beast. It's complexities extend beyond the box it sits on and into your entire Active Directory setup. You need to be aware of it's subtleties with backup, restores and disaster recovery, and what you can and cant do. Likewise you need to understand what it relies on from Active Directory to function, where to place them and how to manage them.

As a basic mail server it's simple to install using the wizards they give you, but long term management and configuration can be quite a learning curve.
 
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