Domains in a forest

amilne

A question regarding domains in a single forest:

I have three domains. Europe, North America and Africa. Each domain has a Sales Group configured as Global Distribution group. Rashmid, a user in the Europe domain needs to be able to email Philip, in the North America domain. Similarly, all domains need to be able to email each other at some time or another.

I think I am looking too deeply into this question and I think there is a much simpler explanation!

How do I achieve this?

Please leave your suggestions.

Adam

royal

Well, this is more of an exchange topic. As I have not done 70-285 which is Exchange design, I will do my best trying to explain this to you. Active Directory stores several partitions. One of them is a configuration partition which is replicated to all domain controllers in an entire forest. Exchange writes information into this Configuration partition. This means that when a client tries to access Exchange information on a domain that does not contain an Exchange Server, the client will contact a Global Catalog Server to find this exchange information for that client to use. This means that both Global Catalog servers as well as Exchange servers rely on the configuration container.

Essentially, this means that Exchange is forest-based. You can actually host mailboxes for domain accounts that are stored in another domain in the same forest. All you really need to do is run a setup /domainprep from the exchange cd to enable a domain to use exchange resources.

Realistically, in this setup, you would probably have 3 different domains in the same forest, and exchange servers at each location to provide local e-mail. I'm a bit touchy on this subject since I have not done 70-285 (Exchange Design) yet.

Hopefully this helps.