Exchange Outlook Web Access is a wonderful feature, but directing users to access it on their own can be a patience testing proposal if you’re not using URL redirection.

For example: you’ve installed Exchange 2010, configured all the appropriate roles, including the CAS (Client Access Server; responsible for OWA), and deserve a hero’s welcome, or at least a pat on the back. You then send an email to staff telling them that they can access webmail from the following public URL – https://webmail.domain.com/owa; easy enough right? Wrong! A few days later, calls come streaming in with users attempting to access OWA using incorrect URL’s: http instead of https, forgetting to append /owa to the URL, etc.

Well you can clear all of this up and make it transparent to the user, and they’ll never know you did it; it will just work.

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An exciting feature of Exchange 2010 is its support for message waiting indicators (MWI).  While this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, one of the biggest complaints about Exchange 2007 was its lack of MWI support.  Even though Exchange Unified Messaging is able to send voicemails to an email address, most users are accustomed to the phone notifying them when they have new voicemail.

Even more exciting were the reports that MWI with Exchange 2010 and Cisco CallManager 7 just worked out of the box without extra configuration. Many articles I read spoke of the ease of configuration at getting this feature enabled. This, however, was not the case in our lab.  As it turns out, some of the default settings for SIP trunks in CCM 7 will cause problems with MWI.

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Secure communications in an Exchange enterprise messaging environment is critical.  In Exchange 2007, Microsoft introduced the use of Unified Communications (UCC) or Subject Alternative Name (SAN) SSL certificates.  These Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates allow the secure use of multiple domain names with one certificate, with some certificate providers allowing the use of up to 100 domain names.  By default, when initially installed, Exchange 2007 provides a self-signed certificate which secures the hostname of the server (netbios and FQDN).  For any use outside of a lab environment, you’ll want to purchase and install a UCC certificate.  UCC certificates can be purchased from any major SSL certificate provider (i.e., GoDaddy, GeoTrust, Entrust, Comodo, etc.).

In this example, I’ll show you how to replace a single domain third-party certificate and a self-signed SSL certificate with a new UCC certificate.

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To Distro or not to distro…

Our customer needed distribution groups from their various SharePoint sites for creating alerts on shared lists and libraries.  Until now, the site administrator was constantly having to add and manage these alerts all on an individual basis, and since each project the customer works with calls for a new SharePoint site, changes were plentiful.

Initially, when trying to create a group, specifically, mail enable a group from within SharePoint, the admin was receiving an error stating: “The group operation succeeded, but the distribution group could not be updated because of the following error: The Directory Management Service reported the following error: Access denied.”

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With Exchange 2007 SP1, and Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services, you may want to enable users to send emails to your security groups.  The dilema is that security groups will not show up in the Global Address List (GAL).  In order to mail-enable an AD DS security group, you must perform two steps:

1) Change the group properties to ensure that the group is a Universal, and not a Global group.  Otherwise Exchange 2007 will not see the group in order to mail-enable it.

2) Perform the following steps from within the Exchange Management Console:

1.     Start the Exchange Management Console.

2.     In the console tree, expand Recipient Configuration, and then click Distribution Group.

3.     In the action pane, click New Distribution Group. The New Distribution Group wizard appears.

4.     On the Introduction page, click Existing Group, and then click Browse.

5.     In Select Group dialog box, select the group that you want mail-enable, and then click OK.

6.     Click Next.

7.     On the Group Information page, complete the following fields:

·         Display name   By default, the display name is the same as the group name. You can modify the name in this field.

·         Alias   By default, the alias is the same as the group name. You can modify the name in this field.

8.     Click Next.

9.     On the New Distribution Group page, review the Configuration Summary. To make any configuration changes, click Back. To create the new distribution group, click New.

10.  On the Completion page, the Summary states whether the distribution group was successfully created. The summary also displays the Exchange Management Shell command that was used to create the distribution group.

11.  Click Finish.

Now, your users will be able to send notifications, etc. to their colleagues via their Outlook client and the GAL.