howto://install Exchange 2010 on a single box-part two

Welcome to our series on installing Exchange. In part one of this two part post, we got Exchange 2010 installed. Now, we have to get it configured. If you followed our instructions from part one, you should have coffee in hand, and are ready to go. If you installed Exchange on your own and are just left with that "what now" feeling (been there, done that, hence the post) you are probably still good to go. We’re working from an install of Exchange 2010 with Hub/CAS/MB roles. If that’s what you’ve got, you’ll be fine with what comes next.

Okay, it’s installed, now what?

It’s still a good question. Now, we need to configure our server to accept email for our domain, set up both send and receive connectors, and then setup an email naming policy and assign email addresses to our domain users. Here’s how to proceed.

Add your internet domain to the “Accepted Domains” list

By default, our new Exchange server is only accepting mail for our internal AD Domain name. Unless we are using the same DNS suffix internally and externally, we need to add our public facing domain name to the list of Accepted Domains.

Open EMC, and browse down to Organization Configuration, Hub Transport.
In the Actions panel, click New Accepted Domain.
Give it a name, put the FQDN of your DNS Domain in the Accepted Domain field, and make sure the "Authoritative Domain" radio button is selected.
Click New.

Configure a send connector for outgoing emails

The send connector is used to route outgoing emails from Exchange either to an SMTP relay, or directly to other SMTP servers on the Internet.

Click on the Send Connectors tab (you should still be in Organization Configuration, Hub Transport.
In the Actions pane, click on New Send Connector
Give it a name, and choose Internet from the drop down list for "intended use." Then click Next.
Click Add, and fill in * for the address to indicate this is for all domains. Click OK, then click Next.
If you have an upstream SMTP relay, select the radio button for "Route mail through…" and add the FQDN of your SMTP relay. If your server can connect to other mail servers directly over the Internet using TCP 25, leave the selection on "Use domain name system…" Then click Next.
If you are using a relay, you’ll need to fill in authentication information, otherwise just click Next again, then New, and you have a Send Connector ready to go.

Assign email addresses to users in the active directory

Now we need to add SMTP addresses to all our users in AD. We can have more than one SMTP address, but we’ll build a new policy for each DNS suffix or name format that we want to add to all users automatically. As long as we have a receive connector for a domain, we can always add aliases to users later. In this example, we assume that we want to give the same format email address and DNS suffix to all our users.

Since you should still be in Organization Configuration, Hub Transport, just click on E-mail Address Policies tab.
In the actions pane, click on New E-mail Address Policy .
Give it a name. Click Next.
Since we want this to apply to all users, we don’t need to set a Condition. Click Next.
Here we need to decide how our email addresses will be formatted. Choose the first part based on AD attributes, and Browse for the DNS suffix (accepted domain) to create the email addresses. Click OK, then click Next.
Set it to run Immediately. Click Next, then click New and watch it rock. Each user in your AD will be updated with their new email address, a mailbox will be created for them, and you can even see them in the GAL.

Now, launch Outlook, configure it to your new account, and send out a test email. If all is well, you should be sending. And this is where we’ll stop, for now. We have Exchange working, we can send out emails, and even send emails within our organisation. Go us! In our next post, we’ll install the Edge Transport role on our TMG 2010 server so we can start receiving mail. Check this link (live 2010-05-07) for that. Until then…

I always like to celebrate a new technical accomplishment with a song that gets to blood pumping. Here’s a favourite that always get me going. Go ahead and click…you’ve earned it! And no, I’m not in this video…they cut my part out. Something about a Phil Collins song, affronts to humanity, etc. etc.