Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with exchange and Server

FW: FW: FW: FW: RE: Check this out! LOL

Liver — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:27:58 -0800

Should I try to take back our Exchange server from the inappropriate uses? I'm an IT worker in a small local government IT shop. We have roughly 250 - 300 users. Recently I've been taking a more active roll in the management of our spam firewall and Exchange server, and have made some interesting observations.

I am not shocked, but I am thoroughly appalled at the amount of personal email that travels through our server. It turns out that the top users of email resources aren't the important decision-makers and managers, but the lowest level employees with very little legitimate work use for email. For example, the #1 email user in our entire organization is a receptionist that answers phones for the tax department. What are these emails? Albino moose pictures, prayer forwards, angel pictures, chain forward, inspirational videos, and the like.

This is just one person, but there are a hundred more out there that either through ignorance of apathy are misusing the government email server as their own personal email provider.

Part of the problem, I think, is that most of these people are not computer & internet savvy. Their email address here is the first one they've ever had, and they have zero concept of what is and isn't appropriate email. To them, there is just EMAIL. Dancing baby forwards are just as legitimate as a message from their boss, or a member of the public seeking help.

As I see it I have a few options.

1) Do nothing. Accept that people are using county resources for their personal business and try to minimize the impact on legitimate users. This is the easy way out, and the way we got into this situation to begin with.

2) Bring the hammer down. Get aggressive with what comes and goes. Block all images by default. Train spam filters to block inappropriate emails. Tighten disk quotas to noose-like levels on "regular" users. Tell users to get hotmail/gmail/yahoo accounts for personal use. Expect resistance.

3) Something in between.

I'm especially interested in hearing from anyone who may have come into a poorly managed IT department and had to affect changes to both the technology and the culture side of problems similar to this.

Help me get Entourage to play nice with my company's exchange server.

kdern — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:18:33 -0800

I need help fixing a problem with email on my Macbook. I am trying to get Entourage to play nice with my office's exchange server. I am running the latest version of Entourage on my Macbook (OSX Leopard).

I can get it to connect to my exchange server when I'm in the office by listing the exchange server as "fs1". With those settings, it doesn't connect when I am out of the office.

When I am out of the office, I have to change the exchange server setting to our exchange server address (our domain name, and then "/exchange". This setting does not work when I am in the office.

There are other problems - when I send an email from Entourage, it is not visible in Outlook back in the office (on my PC). Also, I'm not able to view our company's public contact lists on Entourage.

How can I set up Entourage to work both in and out of the office, and properly sync sent mail?

I am not against using Mac's Mail program or something else, if it will work better.

Thanks for any help.

How much for Exchange for 500-800 users?

jimjam — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:29:12 -0800

MS Exchange railroad: How much does it really cost for an in-house Microsoft Exchange system? The linux/imap/smtp email system at our company sucks (500-800 users) and one of our systems admins wants to deploy Microsoft Exchange (2003 probably) to solve this.

The problem is, the costs and complexity of the proposed Exchange system are spiraling out of control. It went from one physical server hosting Exchange to now 5 or 6 physical servers, each running various components, and talk of server CALs and client CALs. Exchange 2007 will be even more expensive apparently, if/when we upgrade to that.

We're now talking $100k of hardware, and $200-300k of cash thrown at Microsoft, just to get email for several hundred people. (the previous system running on linux was 'cheap', as-in no software license fees, and just a couple servers)

Looking at Microsoft's site, I can't make heads or tails of how this system -really- should be built out (server-wise), and what the actual license costs will be. Scanning the web, I can't find any 'I built Exchange this way for this many people and it cost this much' type of info.

Unfortunately the company brass has already tanked the idea of Google Apps or hosted Exchange, due to security concerns, so I'm actually just looking to find out how much $$ and how complex this Exchange system will be.

I know admin in question is a serious Microsoft zealot, and will just keep on piling on the hardware/software expenses, in order to build a small empire of systems under her control. Plus $500k for email seems pretty extravagant to me personally, and the proposed system is -incredibly- complex. If this admin leaves after setting this all up, we're screwed.

Anyone have any ideas on or pointers on this?

Microsoft Exchange Server for Epsilon Semi-Morons?

loquacious — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:39:04 -0800

How do I set up Microsoft Exchange (or Outlook) Server for a small office? I'm providing basic knuckle-dragger tech support for a small office, and one of the things they want to implement and that I want to provide eventually is an Exchange or Outlook server.

Where do I begin? What should I watch out for? What about security issues?

I will be using Server 2003 and a primarily XP client base.

How can I get full functionality out of MMC?

odinsdream — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:42:13 -0800

Help me better use MMC (Microsoft Management Console) for server maintenance tasks. I manage several servers. Each server has a bunch of stuff available under Administrative Tools. I can open these locally on each machine to maintain the various items, or, I can use one machine and add these snap-ins to one master MMC.

This is what I currently do. I have the Active Directory snap-in for our domain, I have several DHCP snap-ins, and a couple Event Viewers.

However, with the Active Directory snap-in, I cannot access some property pages on the master console that I would be able to access if I were directly working on the server.

For instance, I cannot see a user's Dial-In tab on my master console, but I can see it if I use the same area on the domain controller. Likewise, I don't have any of the user's Exchange tabs on the master console, but these are available if I'm working directly on the Exchange server.

What accounts for these differences, and how can I reconcile them?

Delete/disable a User account but still forward their email?

bartleby — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:59:34 -0800

Server2003/Exchange - can I disable an account but still have its mail delivered/forwarded? In the past, when an employee left, they left and all the lights were turned out for their network/domain access.

Employees are given Terminal Server & Outlook access from home, so it's important that we turn off their remote access. It seemed best to cover all the bases by disabling/deleting the user account ASAP.

Now there's a request to have their email forwarded to a manager for 90 days, "just in case".

In my limited knowledge, that means that the account has to stay active - all I can really do is change the password.

What I'm looking for is a way to remove a user's ability to acess anything on the domain, but to still have any mail sent to "firedguy@company.com" to get automatically forwarded to "firedguysboss@company.com".

Server 2003, Exchange. My Active Directory kung-fu is weak, but I can follow directions. Help?

Why won't they let me use Outlook?

thinktwice — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:17:04 -0800

Any particular reason a company would not allow access to MS Exchange via Outlook and/or cell phone only allow access via Outlook Web Mail? I am working for a small company and they are forcing me to use Outlook Web Mail. I want to use Outlook 2007 to manage my contacts, calendar, etc. I asked he IT guy and he says no way.
What is the point of having MS Exchange server if you can only access via IE? Moreover, I can't even change column widths in Web Mail. Or add contacts. This seems totally weird to me?

So I'll ask to community, is there any legit reason NOT to allow any employee to access Exchange via Outlook and/or phone (Blackberry/Treo)?

How to migrate mailboxes in exchange

daveyt — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 10:17:32 -0800

My company is splitting up soon. We have centralised exchange servers in another country, I need to get away fast. (I am UK based)

My company has 11 offices world wide. All mail is provided via exchange servers (2003) in the US, everyone connects via rpc-connected Outlook 2003. It works fine. We also have an OWA server in the US.

We are 'breaking' up the company, specifically my office is breaking away and we are retaining the company name etc.

I'm most likely not keeping the equipment in the US, I just want the content.

We are single domain AD, with DC's in each site, exchange is in the same domain. Its all fairly simple.

I am planning to create a new domain here, ready to migrate users on to. I'll buy a sexy new exchange server and some storage, re-task some servers as new DC's on my domain.

The Exchange server here will be on a new domain. Can I trust this into the existing organisation in such away that I can transfer mailboxes etc? Once I have transferred mailboxes, I need to cut off from the old domain, never to be reconnected.

intended for external use only - do not put in mouth

bartleby — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:56:53 -0800

Exchange Server - how do I get it to attach a signature to all outgoing mail? The "simple" answer is to go to every single user's Outlook and set the signature up for them, appended to their usual signature.

But there must be a way to get a signature (actually, a legal disclaimer) automatically attached to all outgoing mail for all users - at the server level.

Yes? No? Help?

How to POP an Exchange 2k3 server using Outlook

SparkyPine — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 14:21:38 -0800

I need to allow a few people to access our mail server using Outlook from outside the building. They use OWA yet do not like having to use a web page to do this (yeah, I know...). I thought of setting up POP3 but am not sure what ports I need to open on the firewall (110, 25 do not seem to cut it). What is the functional difference between POP3 and IMAP and is either one better/easier to setup? (File folder sharing would be an optional objective). Microsoft's KB system sucks...any other useful articles out there?