Managing Exchange Server 2007 address lists

This is part 7 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.

Address lists are managed in the Exchange Management Console on the Mailbox node under Organization Configuration in the console tree. They can be found by selecting the Address List tab in the results pane. Address lists are created by using filter rules—rules that search Active Directory and find objects that match a predefined set of criteria. Once all the objects are accumulated, a list is built and it becomes an address list.

Figure 3-43 shows the Introduction page of the Edit Address List Wizard when editing the All Users address list. You'll notice the recipient filter in Figure 3-43 showing the LDAP filter that the list will return from Active Directory.

Figure 3-43. Editing the All Users address list. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Default lists are provided for All Contacts, All Groups, All Rooms, All Users, and Public Folders. Additional rule sets can be created by selecting New Address List in the action pane and following the wizard. Interestingly enough, you really don't need a developer to create these rules. Exchange asks for the types of recipients and allows you to specify that the recipients belong to a certain company, department, or state/province.

An address list is another object in the directory, so it will have an Access Control List (ACL) for security purposes. This means that you can create an address list, and then specify who can access it by assigning permissions to the list using users and groups in Active Directory. Some address lists, such as top corporate executives or those who hold sensitive positions, may not want their email addresses available to everyone. Use the ACL to limit who can see sensitive address lists. By default, the Everyone group is not given any access and the Authenticated Users group is only given List Contents permissions.

After an address list is created, it will not update immediately. If you need it to update immediately, or if you just want to force an address list to update because new users have been added to Active Directory, you can use the Update-EmailAddressPolicy cmdlet within the Exchange Management Shell.

Offline address lists

An offline address list is simply an address list made up of other address lists that, when combined, are available as a single list when Outlook clients are offline. If you need certain address lists available offline, then you'll need to create them in the Offline Address Lists area of the Mailbox node under Organization Configuration. When creating an offline address list, you will need to specify the server responsible for generating the list, as well as the address lists that should be included when users are offline, as shown in Figure 3-44. You cannot copy and paste an address list from one container to another, so if you need to create an intricate set of address lists that are available both on the local area network (LAN) and remotely, you'll need to perform two steps -- first create the address list and then create a corresponding offline address list.

Figure 3-44. Creating a new offline address list. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Unlike previous versions of Exchange, where the offline address list was published in the public folders, Exchange 2007, in conjunction with Outlook 2007, supports publishing the offline address list via Web-based distribution. This allows your Outlook 2007 client to remain updated even when not in the office. Figure 3-45 shows the Distribution Points page of the New Offline Address List Wizard, where you can specify which Exchange server and corresponding Web site within that server's IIS instance will host the offline address list.

Figure 3-45. Specify the location of the offline address list distribution point. (Click on image for enlarged view.)

Summary

This chapter explained how to create and manage mailbox, contact, and distribution group recipients. It also detailed how to create and manage address lists. This was a big "how-to" chapter and it should get you going on the basics of managing mailboxes in your environment.

In the next chapter, we'll take a look at how public folders are created and managed. This is a more complex topic, but just as necessary to performing good day-to-day Exchange administration. Despite solutions like SharePoint Server to make information available to multiple users, public folders are still a very large part of most Exchange installations, so don't skip over the next chapter.

Tutorial: Creating and managing recipients in Exchange Server 2007

 Home: Introduction to Exchange 2007 recipients
 Part 1: Creating and configuring Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes
 Part 2: How to configure Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes
 Part 3: Deleting and reconnecting Exchange Server 2007 mailboxes
 Part 4: Setting up Exchange Server 2007 contacts
 Part 5: Creating mail users in Exchange Server 2007
 Part 6: How to create and configure Exchange Server 2007 distribution groups
 Part 7: Managing Exchange Server 2007 address lists

This chapter excerpt from Microsoft Exchange Server 2007: A Beginner's Guide, by Nick Cavalancia, is printed with permission from The McGraw-Hill Companies, copyright 2008. Click here for the chapter download or purchase the book here.