Setting up Exchange 2007 - Newbie!

Izi · 23 Jun 2008 at 11:09

Hi Tech People,

I dont have any experiance with Exchange, but am wanting to set it up for our internal emails after being showed what it can do.

I am not too technical, but have set up Windows domains, DNS, IIS/SQL before so not complete novice.

How hard is the set up of Exchange? Can anyone give me any pointers, or show me any good tutorials?

I am about to install Windows 2008 on to a new server I have just built, then I will start to instal Exchange, but was hoping for a little advice first.

Many thanks.

King Arthur · 23 Jun 2008 at 13:48

Hi

Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 are big beasts and are not ideal for learning on.

What i woudl suggest is you download the beta of SBS 2008 (small business server 2008) off the microsoft web site and use that for emails.

When you say internal emails i presume you mean for your company as a whole i.e. recieveing and sending emails from internal people to internal people and internal to external people?

Settign up exchange is not hard, but exchange 2007 with server 2008 does not support pop3 and only smtp if your wishign for it to handle external emails.

To start with you will need to set up a domain (internal one) and set up all your users etc, then install exchange 2007 which will pick up and integrate with you existing domain.

Shoudl you only wish to use it for internal emails and not recieve any external ones setting up smtp will not be nessary. Once the domain has been created and all set simply install outlook onto each client and link that to the exchange server and your away. Simple as that really.

Setting up exchange 2007 for external emails requires more configuration with mx records and is far too much to type here i think (maybe some oen else will help more though)

personally if your a small business use, sbs 2003 or sbs 2008, its all wizard based and does a lot of the initial set up for you and im sure 90% of the people here will agree with me.

Why do you specifically want to use exchange 2007, or do you simply like the idea of having you own internal mail server?

Phil

CraigN · 23 Jun 2008 at 14:07

you will need a 64 bit OS for Exchange 2007

you will also need Exchange 2007 with SP1 for it to install on a 2008 based infrastructure.

2003 RC2 64bit maybe easier to start with or even exchange 2003.

Exchange 2007 is pretty easy to install if you mis a pre requisite it will give you a list untill you have done them all.

Izi · 23 Jun 2008 at 14:49

Thanks for the replies guys.

The reason I want to use 2008 and exchange 2007 is because I have legit copies of them through work!

I want to set up for our office email to be used through Exchange, sending internal and external emails. As far as DNS and MX is concernce, all our DNS and MX records are hosted on a third party server controlled from one place. Why would I have to set up MX records on the actual server?

The reason I would like to use Exchange is for the roaming email feature which is great, sharing of contacts and meetings etc. I also want to learn about Exchange, as its one area I havent touched on and it gets great reviews.

We also want to use the push feature for our mobile phones.

Best,
W

King Arthur · 23 Jun 2008 at 16:07

as you get it through work its a good enough reason i guess to use it.

Setting up server and exchange is not easy to learn. NOTHING is done for you, so you need to knwo the in's and out's of setting it up, which is not something "i" atleast am prepared to wrote out on here.

People learn for month on server and exchange and putting it into a live environment is not wise unless you knwo what your doing.

The MX records are set up by your ISP and need to point to your server so when yo get mail by SMTP it knows where its going. To get smtp mail once you mx records is set up is port forward, port 25 to your server and then tell it to accept the domain name and then set up the users to get the email based upon their account email address's.

Push mail need a proper SSL cert and not one that is self certified other wise you stand a very high chance of it not working.

I suggest you start by reading up on Server 2008 active directory deployment and then exchange integration.

To start off setting up the domain in server 2008 in the run command type "dcpromo" iirc this will create an domain and active directory. From this install exchange.

When setting up exchange make sure that when sending email you use you ISP's smtp server for routing mail other wise you will be black listed as spam.

Phil

Sone · 24 Jun 2008 at 01:34

i have never done Win 2008 + Exchange 2007 but installing Ex2003 on Win2003 was infintly easier than Exchange 5.5 and NT4.

As such i expect it to be easier still, just take things slowly and spend lots of times testing before putting box in a live enviroment. A testing domain would be a wise investment ihmo

EDIT, in my experiance of exchange 5.5/2000/2003 installing and configuring is faily easy, its once you try and do advanced things things get complicated