UMRA & Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010

I was recently working on a project where I got knee deep in Exchange 2007.  The knowledge I share here should apply to 2003 and 2010 as well. What I’ll show you is how easy it is to manage Exchange accounts with Tools4ever‘s UMRA, which supports all of the above, including their “cloud” derivatives such as Live@EDU and Office 365.

There are really 2 possible “email” configurations you can give a user:

1. Internal email (i.e. John.Smith@my.org)
2. External email (i.e. jsmith@yahoo.com)

This translates into the following possible Exchange/AD (“Active Directory”) configurations:

1. AD User /w Exchange Mailbox (Internal email only)
2. AD User Mail-Enabled in Exchange (External & Internal email)
3. AD Contact (External & Internal email)

…on top of this, there are things like mail, proxyAddresses, mailNickname, targetAddress, and other attributes that all need to be provisioned properly. Here’s how UMRA makes it easy.

Exchange 2007 Mailbox (AD User)

Let’s say you have AD user “jsmith” an you want their email to be John.Smith@my.org; this is all you have to do:

Exchange 2007 Mail User (AD User)

The idea here is when your user already has their own email (jsmith@hotmail.com in the example below), and will not be needing an actual mailbox in your Exchange, but you still want them to have John.Smith@my.org email address that would show up when your users type their name in Outlook on TO line. This is applicable when the user already has an AD account and you don’t want to create extra objects in AD:

Exchange 2007 Mail Contact (no AD User)

Same scenario as above, except you don’t have an AD user and don’t want to create one.  In this case you can resort to creating an Exchange contact, which is still an AD object, but nowhere nearly as dangerous as a user (i.e. cannot login with it):

Conclusion

The project I worked on had very explicit requirements for provisioning attributes like mailNickname and targetAddress, for sake of supporting secondary processes.  At first, I was managing these attributes manually, which I later realized was a waste of time, because doing the above commands in UMRA takes care of it all!