Exchange Server 2010 is one of the most flexible and robust products in managing the messaging infrastructure of the organization. It includes a considerable number of features that help control the way emails are exchanged within the premises of the company. While the default setup provides a functional setup, it is worth looking at other features to get the most of this product. In this two-part white paper, we explore these features and take a look at how they can be implemented on top of a standard installation of Exchange servers in the organization. Part 1 examines, Optimizing the Mailbox Server Role and Optimizing the Client Access Server (CAS). Part 2 looks at Optimizing the Hub Transport Server, Miscellaneous Features, and Lync- SharePoint Integration.
The mailbox server role is one of the most critical components of Exchange. It is the location where the user's data is stored. It is also a key component in the proper functioning of the following:
Hosting of public folder databases;
E-mail address policies and address lists;
Retention policies and messaging record management;
Offline Address Book generation server role.
While the standard setup creates the default mailbox database and allows storage of e-mails, additional features can be used to ease the administration of different types of objects, turn on archival for user mailboxes or implement high availability and failover clustering in the design.
The default storage location of the mailbox database, as well as the logs, is the system drive. For performance and better recovery, it is recommended to move these components on separate physical drives or locations within a SAN. A minimum RAID level, such as RAID1 or RAID5, will provide fault tolerance for that data.
The databases and logs can be moved within the Exchange Management Console (Organization Configuration-> Database Management-> Right-click on database-> Move database path) or with the following sample cmdlet:
Move-DatabasePath -Identity 'Marketing' -EdbFilePath 'D:\DBs\Marketing.edb' -LogFolderPath 'D:\DBs\ Marketing'
Databases will be dismounted while the move operation is in progress.
Exchange Standard Edition supports five database instances, while the Enterprise Edition supports 100. It is recommended to use smaller databases - fewer users are affected in the case of an outage, backup and restore is quicker, more granularity when it comes to applying quotas, and much more.
Resources mailboxes are practical for managing meetings and booking different types of resources, such as projectors, rooms, whiteboards, and other type of equipment. This feature permits the automatic management of the resources through the Resource Booking Attendant, as well as other numerous options that allow administrators to granularly control how resources can be used and scheduled in meetings.
Prior to using resource mailboxes, in a legacy environment, we would create a generic Active Directory (AD) account that would then be treated as the resource object, or we can create specific calendars in public folders, from where management of these objects would be done. Now, a type of mailbox exists exclusively for that purpose.
With resource mailboxes, a specific type of object is created within the organization, and then used in meeting requests of users though Outlook or Outlook Web App. Instead of using a generic account for managing these types of operations, a resource mailbox allows for the creation of a specific type of user account in AD that is disabled after creation.
Key features of the resource mailboxes include the following:
Specify who can use resource objects and exceptions when it comes to users that can override approval of delegates (resource in-policy and out-of-policy meeting requests)
Ability to specify objects found in a specific conference room that users can see through the description of the resource in their Exchange client (resource custom properties)
Control meeting requests though the Exchange client without having to add the resource mailbox as an additional mailbox in Outlook (resource delegates)
Ability to specify properties of a room or resource, such as duration, conflicts, room capacity, etc. (resource policies)
Change common options of the resource mailbox through the Exchange Control Panel
It is possible to create new mailbox resource objects through the Exchange Management Console or through the Exchange Management Shell using the following examples:
Conference room
New-Mailbox -Room -Name 'Room1' -Alias 'Room1' -UserPrincipalName 'Room1@contoso.com' -First- Name 'Room' -LastName '1'
Projector
New-Mailbox -Equipment -Name 'Projector1' -Alias 'Projector1' -UserPrincipalName 'Projector1@contoso. com' -FirstName 'Projector' -LastName '1'
It is also possible to convert an existing legacy room resource account into a resource mailbox using the following command:
Set-Mailbox "LegacyRoom1" -Type Room
Dynamic distribution groups are useful when membership of users change often in e-mail groups. A static distribution group gets its members assigned manually by the recipient administrators. In contrast, dynamic distribution groups take advantage of AD attributes to automatically assign memberships to users by defining filters and conditions.
For instance, when an employee changes function or department, an administrator changes the corresponding attributes in AD, and the user account's membership to an e-mail group also changes without direct interaction to the group properties.
We can use very specific filters to fulfill different business requirements, such as sending e-mail to all users in a specific location, or to accounts that share some information in common.
No comments:
Post a Comment