Creating an ethical firewall in Exchange Server 2007

Publicly traded companies and government agencies sometimes prohibit certain employees or departments from communicating with each other -- either because of federal regulations or to avoid any perception of impropriety, corruption or bias. An Exchange Server 2007 ethical firewall allows you to set up restrictions on specific employees' email communications to help prevent such issues.

Ethical firewall exception rules

If blocking all communications between certain employees seems too severe, you do have the option of creating exception rules. For example, you could create an Exchange Server 2007 ethical firewall that allows User1 to send email to User2 unless a specified word appeared in the email's subject line.

Of course, users could potentially misuse the exception rules to pass sensitive or unauthorized information. If this is a concern, just don't build any exceptions into your Exchange Server 2007 ethical firewall.

Another consideration for exception rules is that you will have to take the time to explain them to the users they apply to. This means that the users will know exactly how to circumvent the ethical firewall.

However, it also means that they are not going to pass sensitive information through the firewall accidentally. If a user circumvents an ethical firewall by using an exception rule, they will have knowingly violated a corporate policy, and the company should have no problems terminating that employee over the incident.

Disclaimer: At the time I wrote this tip, both Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Outlook 2007 were both in public beta testing. The procedures below could potentially change by the time the official versions are released.

Creating an ethical firewall in Exchange Server 2007

For the instructions below I'm going to refer to my earlier example scen

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ario. I will pretend that two users, User1 and User2, must be prohibited from sending work-related email to each other due to the sensitive nature of their jobs.

To make things a bit more interesting, I will also walk you through the process of setting up an exception rule, so that User1 and User2 can send emails to each other if the words "Emergency" or "Social" appear in an email's subject line.

About the author: Brien M. Posey, MCSE, is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his work with Exchange Server, and has previously received Microsoft's MVP award for Windows Server and Internet Information Server (IIS). Brien has served as CIO for a nationwide chain of hospitals and was once responsible for the Department of Information Management at Fort Knox. As a freelance technical writer, Brien has written for Microsoft, TechTarget, CNET, ZDNet, MSD2D, Relevant Technologies and other technology companies. You can visit Brien's personal Web site at http://www.brienposey.com.

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