Tag Archives: Control Panel

Exchange

Hosted Exchange 2013

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Almost two years ago I wrote a couple of blog posts regarding Hosted Exchange 2010 SP2 (or later):

When building Hosted Exchange 2013 things are not very different. You have to prepare Active Directory for hosting purposes and set the permissions in Active Directory on OU level. When it comes to Exchange 2013 itself, address list segregation is still achieved by using Address Book Policies. One thing that is fundamentally different is SMTP routing in a hosted Exchange. In Exchange 2010 3rd party Routing Agents were used, but in Exchange 2013 there’s an Address Book Policy Routing agent that respects the Address Book Policies that are provisioned for every tenant. Continue reading Hosted Exchange 2013 →

Exchange

Control Panel in hosted Exchange 2010 SP2

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In the past I’ve blogged about building a hosted Exchange 2010 SP2 environment. Basically you have to prepare Active Directory, create a hosting container where all customer containers (also referred to as organizations, not to mess up with an Exchange organization) are located, secure the OU’s etc. Also you have to create Address Lists, Address Book Policies, Offline Address Books (do not forget to secure these to prevent unwanted downloads) and all this in a reliable and consistent manner.

It is certainly doable with a lot of scripting and HTML knowledge (been there, done that) but the overall recommendation is to use a Control Panel vendor. You can find an overview on the Microsoft website: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/hh563895.aspx

Using a Control Panel

There are a number of vendors, each having their own pros and cons but all work according to the same principle using a provisioning engine. This provisioning engine is talking to all services in your environment like Active Directory, Exchange, Lync or Sharepoint. It is also possible to add even more services like CRM, Hyper-V, online backup or Azure.

Continue reading Control Panel in hosted Exchange 2010 SP2 →

Exchange

Exchange /hosting discontinued

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Everybody that has hosted Exchange 2010 running using the /hosting switch knows it is a real painful experience. It is difficult to implement, it is difficult to maintain and there quite a lot of functionality missing like UM, Public Folders, the Exchange Management Console and integration with other products like Lync Server 2010 or Sharepoint Server 2010.

There has been a lot of complaints from hosters about this situation at Microsoft and Microsoft had to make a painful decision: Microsoft will no longer invest in the /hosting version of Exchange Server 2010 and it will be discontinued in the next version of Exchange Server (code name Exchange 15).

Continue reading Exchange /hosting discontinued →

Exchange

Exchange 2010 Hosting mode revisited

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I already blogged earlier about the multi-tenant hosting possibilities in Exchange 2010 SP1 when using the /hosting switch during installation. This provides a true multi-tenant Exchange 2010 environment but lacks quite an amount of functionality, like Public Folders, the Unified Messaging Role, Lync Server 2010 multi-tenant integration (although an update on this is expected later this year) and provisioning difficulties. You can read my two earliers blog post on Exchange 2010 hoster edition and Exchange 2010 SP1 hosting & Control Panel. Although it is doable, it is difficult at the same time.

With the upcoming Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2010 there’s nothing new with respect to the Hoster Edition, but for a normal installation (also referred to as on-premises installation) a new feature called Address Book Policies (ABP) will be presented. The new ABP feature is the successor of the Exchange 2007 Address List Segregation (which is not supported in Exchange 2010 since it might horribly break Exchange 2010). This makes it easier for non hosting customers to implement multiple address lists without using the /hosting switch (please remember you need to be a registered hoster to officially use the hoster edition of Exchange 2010 SP1).

Continue reading Exchange 2010 Hosting mode revisited →

Exchange

Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting & Control Panel

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In an earlier article I explained a bit about the hosting features that are available in Exchange Server 2010 SP1. This hoster edition (I’ll abbreviate this to HEX2010SP1) is primarily targeted towards hosting companies, you need for example an SPLA license agreement to resell this.

Note: if you need really to address this functionality inside an enterprise organization, then you have to stick with Exchange 2007. Or you have to wait for Exchange 2010 SP2 which will likely contain this functionality in a form of Address Book Policies.

Continue reading Exchange 2010 SP1 Hosting & Control Panel →