This first section on mailbox management
tackles the most common tasks: creating, managing, and deleting
mailboxes associated with a real user account. If you are upgrading
from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010, the most important
thing you need to learn up-front and immediately is that mailbox
management tasks are no longer performed via extensions to Active
Directory Users and Computers.
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An organization, STUV, had user account and Exchange
mailbox administrators spread out across eight different offices in
North America. After they completed their upgrade to Exchange Server
2010 and removed their Exchange 2003 servers, they frequently found
that they were having problems with new users accessing their mailboxes.
A new user would be created, but the user was never
able to access her mailbox. The user did not appear in the Global
Address List (GAL), nor did she get email addresses. The problem
continued to escalate to the corporate help desk but the "solution"
they found was to move the mailbox to another database.
After much investigation, the corporate email
administrator found that some of the remote user account administrators
were still using the Exchange 2003 extensions to Active Directory Users
and Computers (ADUC). The Recipient Update Service (RUS) that took care
of stamping a user account with email address and address list
membership information no longer exists in Exchange Server 2010. The
Exchange Server 2010 Management Console and the Exchange Management
Shell take care of all these tasks the instant that the object is
created rather than the RUS taking care of this a few seconds or
minutes later. Thus, the ADUC extensions provided with Exchange 2003 no
longer worked.
Rather than moving the mailboxes to another
database, this issue could also have been fixed using the Exchange
Management Shell and the Set-Mailbox cmdlet. The Set-Mailbox cmdlet has an -ApplyMandatoryProperties option that would fix this as well.
As administrators' areas of responsibility are moved
from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, their management tools should
immediately be upgraded. The Exchange Server 2003 management tools must
be removed, and administrators should be provided with a way to use the
Exchange 2010 management tools, such as upgrading their desktop systems
to an x64 operating system or accessing the tools via Remote Desktop to
a Windows 2008 x64 Terminal Server.
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The Exchange Management Console (EMC) allows you to
associate a mailbox with an existing user in the Active Directory, or
you can create the user account (if you have the necessary
permissions). All mailbox management–related tasks handled within the
Exchange Management Console are performed within the Mailbox
subcontainer of the Recipient Configuration container, as shown in Figure 1. By default, all mailboxes in the entire organization are shown in this container.
The rules for mailbox ownership and associating an
account with a mailbox have not changed since Exchange 2000. There are
a few important things to keep in mind with respect to user account and
mailbox management:
A user account can own only a single mailbox or a single mailbox and an archive mailbox associated with that mailbox.
A user account can be given permissions to other mailboxes.
Each mailbox must be associated with a user account that is in the same Active Directory forest as the Exchange server.
A
single user account from another Active Directory forest can own a
mailbox, but a user account in the Exchange server's home forest must
still exist and be associated with the mailbox.
