Creating and configuring Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes

This is part 1 from "Creating and managing recipients in Exchange Server 2007," excerpted from Chapter 3 of the book Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: A Beginner's Guide, written by Nick Cavalancia and published by The McGraw-Hill Companies, copyright 2008.

Unlike previous versions of Exchange, where the focus was on creating a user and then associating a mailbox to it, think of this version as reversing the two. Since you'll be working within the Exchange Management Console, the focus is the mailbox; the user is somewhat secondary. Begin managing mailboxes by selecting the Mailbox node in the console tree, just under Recipient Configuration, shown in Figure 3-1.

The results pane shows any mailboxes that exist within the organization. Even though you may have many more user accounts in Active Directory, this list is specific to those users that have a mailbox. To begin creating a mailbox, select New Mailbox from the action pane. The New Mailbox Wizard starts, giving you the option to create one of the four mailbox types described earlier, as shown in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-1. You manage recipients within the Exchange Management Console. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Figure 3-2. Starting the New Mailbox Wizard. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Let's walk through creating each of the four types of mailboxes, starting with the user mailbox.

While the purposes for each mailbox type are different, the process is exactly the same, with one caveat -- the user account either selected or created during the creation of the room or equipment mailbox is disabled at the end of the wizard. I'll walk through the creation of a user mailbox to demonstrate creating all three mailbox types.

Select the User Mailbox option, and click Next. On the User Type page of the wizard, you can choose to either create a new user as part of creating the user mailbox or select an existing user that currently does not have a mailbox associated with it, shown in Figure 3-3. Should you need to create a user, you would select New User and click Next, which would display the User Information pane, shown in Figure 3-4. Otherwise, you select Existing User on the User Type page and click the Browse button to select a user, as shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-3. Select the type of mailbox to create (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Figure 3-4. Create a user within the New Mailbox Wizard. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Figure 3-5. Select an existing user within the New Mailbox Wizard. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Whether you create a new user and provide user information or select an existing user, the next page in the wizard is the Mailbox Settings page, shown in Figure 3-6. On this page, you need to specify the alias for the mailbox (which defaults to the user name), the server and mailbox location, and two advanced parameters for establishing mailbox policies (which establish mailbox retention settings, for example) and a policy for ActiveSync (which configures settings for Pocket PC clients that utilize ActiveSync to retrieve messages).

Once you have configured the mailbox settings, click Next, review the configuration summary (shown in Figure 3-7), and click New to complete the wizard.

Figure 3-6. Select Configuring the mailbox settings. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Figure 3-7. Completing the New Mailbox Wizard. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Management Shell Corner

Throughout this book, when appropriate, I will cover how to accomplish a task from within the Exchange Management Shell using an example command. You should consider the commands presented as examples; you will need to provide your own parameters specific to your organization, servers, storage, etc. To create a new mailbox from the Exchange Management Shell, run the following command (I've added parameters matching the previous GUI-based creation example to show you the equivalent command):

New-Mailbox -alias JJohnson -database 'First Storage GroupMailbox Database' -Name JJohnson -OrganizationalUnit Users -password $password -FirstName Jenay -LastName Johnson -DisplayName 'Jenay Johnson'

Note that the $password value is established by first entering the following command so that the user will be prompted for the password:

$password = Read-Host "Enter password" –AsSecureString

If you are creating a new mailbox for an existing user, the command would be:

Enable-Mailbox -Identity:'pennywiseresort.local/Pennywise Users/Jenay Johnson' -Alias:'JJohnson' -Database: 'First Storage GroupMailbox Database'

In addition to using the Management Shell Corner throughout this book, you can find more information on how to work with the Exchange Management Shell in Chapter 14. Note that after you run any wizard-driven process within the Exchange Management Console, you will also see the Exchange Management Shell cmdlet and appropriate switches used to perform the command.

As you recall from earlier in this chapter, a linked mailbox is a mailbox in your Exchange organization that is associated with a user in another Active Directory forest. So the process in your organization is essentially the same as with the previous three mailbox types, with the user account specified from your organization disabled, but specifying another Active Directory forest, domain controller in that forest, and user account that will be granted access to the mailbox in your organization, shown in Figure 3-8.

Figure 3-8. Specifying the user account to be linked to a mailbox. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Management Shell Corner

To create a linked mailbox from the Exchange Management Shell, perform the following command:

New-Mailbox -Database "First Storage GroupMailbox Database" -Name "Shelly Thomas" -LinkedDomainController "NW-DC1" -LinkedMasterAccount NICKELWISESThomas -LinkedCredentials NICKELWISEAdministrator -OrganizationalUnit Users