Chapter 5: Creating and Managing Exchange Recipients

Overview

One of an administrator ‚ s most important tasks is to create and configure Exchange recipients . A recipient is an object in Active Directory that references a resource that can receive a message.

The resource might be a mailbox in a private Information Store, such as in the case of a user , or a public folder in the public Information Store that is shared by many users. No matter where an actual resource exists, though, a recipient object is always created in the Active Directory.

In this chapter, we will discuss the types of Exchange recipients, their creation, and their properties. Exchange has four basic types of recipients:

Users A user is an Active Directory object that typically represents a person who uses the network. Once Exchange is installed and updates the schema, each user in the Active Directory can be mailbox-enabled, mail-enabled, or neither . A mailbox-enabled user has an associated mailbox in a private Information Store on an Exchange server. Each user ‚ s mailbox is a private storage area that allows an individual user to send, receive, and store messages. A mail-enabled user is one who has an e-mail address but does not have a mailbox on an Exchange server. These users send and receive e-mail by using an external ISP.

Groups A group in Active Directory is like a container to which you can assign certain permissions and rights. You can then place users (and other groups) into that group, and they automatically inherit the group ‚ s permissions and rights. Exchange uses the concept of mail-enabled groups to form distribution lists. Messages sent to a group are redirected and sent to each member of the group. These groups allow users to send messages to multiple recipients without having to address each recipient individually.

Contacts A contact is a pointer object that refers to an e-mail address for a non-Exchange recipient. Contacts are most often used for connecting your organization to foreign messaging systems, such as Microsoft Mail, Lotus cc:Mail, or the Internet. As an administrator, you would create contacts so that frequently used e-mail addresses are available in the Global Address List (GAL) as real names . This makes it easier to send mail because users do not need to guess at cryptic e-mail addresses.

Public folders A public folder is like a public mailbox. It is a container for information to be shared among a group of people. Public folders can contain e-mail messages, forms, word-processing documents, spreadsheet files, and files of many other formats. Public folders can also be configured to send information to other recipients.

The rest of this chapter discusses the creation and configuration of these four recipient objects, as well as related management tasks.