Administering Exchange 2000

Another big change from previous Exchange versions is the integration between Exchange 2000 and IIS 5.0. In previous versions, Exchange actually had its own SMTP, POP3 and NNTP services, amongst others. Not any more. In Exchange 2000, the protocols are all part of IIS, and their functionality is extended with the introduction of Exchange 2000 into the network. Exchange simply worries about the public and mailbox stores, which we will be getting to in a future article. OWA has been enhanced, and is now setup by default when you install Exchange 2000. Just direct your browser to http://exchange_server_name.yourdomain.com/exchange, and you are ready to rock and roll. Some of the enhancements to OWA include the ability to place audio and video clips directly into a message and support for public folders that contain contacts and appointments. I am including a look at the interface here so that you can see how much closer OWA resembles the full blown Outlook client than its predecessor.

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And while we are at it, you might notice that I have an NDR that has been sent to the administrator. This question had come up in the newsgroups the other day (thanks Kathy!) so I thought that this might be a great chance to give you a VISUAL indication of what happens when we set up someone to receive an NDR. Normally we probably won’t use OWA for this purpose, but it gives us the chance to see how versatile this product is. I open up the NDR report, and you will notice an attachment called Test:

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If I open up the attachment, I can see the body of the message that was undeliverable. In this case, it was a test message that I had sent to see how OWA would handle NDR’s.

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As you can see, I have answered all the questions that I had in my email, and Kathy should be happy in knowing that she can use either OWA or Outlook to receive NDR reports and view the original message that had been sent. Outlook handles the process a little more cleanly in my opinion, and if you have questions on how that works, see the post entitled, “NDR Forwarding” from Kathy in the Exchange 2000 newsgroup here at 2000trainers.com. I think that we will take one more look at our ESM (Exchange System Manager) and then we will call it a day. If you remember, at the beginning of the article I showed you the default view for ESM, and what it contained. But by now, if you have been working with Exchange 2000 or know of anyone who does, you have probably heard about Administrative Groups and Routing Groups. Well, I am going to show you how to set ESM to display these two groups, and this will lead us into our next article, which is going to be all about Administrative Groups and to a lesser degree, Routing Groups. As these are both new in Exchange 2000, I figured that we should get a good look at them.

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As you can see, what I did was right-clicked on the Organization object in ESM, and there are the two check boxes for displaying Administrative Groups and Routing Groups. I will check the boxes, and you will see the following message:

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Don’t fall for it…it’s a lie!! Once you click on OK, your screen will automatically refresh, and you will be left with something that looks like this:

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I expanded out the Administrative Groups so that you could see how the Routing Groups fit into the ESM heirarchy. This should also help you if you have been trying to follow step by step instructions in a book, but they have the Administrative Groups displayed and you don’t! That can be frustrating, but now that you know how to switch back and forth between the two different views, you shouldn’t have anymore problems with this. Of course, we have only just scratched the surface when it comes to Administrative and Routing Groups, and as promised, next week we will delve into these two new options in more detail. We will find out what they are each for, how we create them, and what any benefits or limitations are of them. We will also look at creating them, and deleting them and some issues that occur when you have multiple Administrative Groups defined in your organization. As I mentioned earlier, our main focus will be on Administrative Groups, but we will look at Routing Groups as well. Until next week, cya!