-
Most administrators of the Exchange environment should be set as Exchange Administrators, leaving the Exchange Full Administrator role only to one individual, who will have the authority to grant the Exchange Administrator right to others.
-
Exchange View Only Administrators should be used for operations staff, network infrastructure staff, or other administrators who need to view the status of Exchange functions but who should not need to directly modify or make changes to the functions.
-
Auditing should be enabled to track all administrative changes in Exchange. This ensures a trail for viewing modifications or changes to key Exchange settings.
-
Message and storage limits give administrators the capability to control the size of messages sent or received, or the amount of message space a user may store for messages. An organization can set up different groups with different message and storage limits, thus setting an organization standard configuration while allowing certain users to exceed the standard.
-
With wireless mobility built into Exchange Server 2003, an administrator can allow users to synchronize their Pocket PC “enabled device or view messages using their HTML-enabled mobile phones.
-
The ExMerge utility not only provides administrators the capability to back up mailboxes for a migration, but it also allows administrators to move mailboxes from one server to another in case a user needs to move between Exchange sites.
-
Moving mailboxes between databases or servers within an Exchange Site can be done by simply using the Mailbox Move tool built into the Exchange System Manager.
-
Contacts are used in the Exchange System Manager to enable an address where mail messages can be forwarded to another address. This is commonly used to reroute or forward messages out of the Exchange environment into another messaging system, possibly during a migration or in a mixed-mail environment.
-
Distribution Groups can be used to create internal mailing lists that might be different from security groups created within Windows. When possible, try to create a Windows security group and mail-enable the group rather than creating separate security groups and Distribution Groups that include the same list of users.
-
Query-based Distribution Groups should be used when group membership might change. The use of query-based Distribution Groups can dynamically create a distribution list based on an Active Directory user's Object Properties information.
-
Routing Groups should be created any time messages should be throttled between locations. This might be to manage communication between locations over a slow or unreliable communications line, or to provide redundancy between sites.
-
Administrative Groups should be created to set up administrative boundaries in an organization. However, if all administrators will share administrative responsibilities (that is, every administrator is a member of each Administrative Group), the organization should seriously consider a single Administrative Group and simplify the process.
-
The Mailbox Recovery Center tool can recover disconnected mailboxes or resolve mailbox conflicts. However, it does not fix corrupted mailboxes. An organization should leverage mailbox-recovery functions covered in Chapter 32, "Recovering from a Disaster," for mailbox recovery due to data corruption.
-
The Mailbox Manager utility should be used to clean up an Exchange messaging system of unused objects, report on the status of Exchange mail transactions, and perform automated cleanup tasks on mailboxes.
