installing exchange 2007 on diff domain

Young Grasshopper

hi everyone,


i work for an application service provideo. when we get a new client, its ussally a 5-6 servers setup consisting of a small domain we create for them and they access the servers via vpn/terminal servers. occasionally customers also rent out non-medical servers(an accounting server, a test server, etc...)


anyway a client of ours is renting out a an exchange server and we will be in charge of the setup/migration/golive. they are moving away from something called 'mailmax'. this is brand new to me and i am going thru the trainsignal/cbt nuggets videos on setting it up. however in both videos, the exchange server is installed on the same domain as the other machines in the network. this situation is obviously different as this will be 2 diff domains. what is the best possible way to approach this and what should be some things to be looking out for? ive used exchange before(but never set it up from scratch) and most of the management was done via AD. im guessting we can just set it up on our own domain(not the clients) and have any kind of management done by the client thru rdp into the server? not sure. id like to keep it off thier domain, but keep the management as simple as possible for them.

Mishra

Take a look at how another company does this.

http://www.mailstreet.com/exchange/howitworks.asp

And see if that helps you. I haven't seen those videos so they might be crap. >_< I don't have time to give you a real good post on how this can be done so hopefully that will be enough.

Young Grasshopper

thanks

dynamik

You might also want to check out the Exchange Hosted Services Virtual Labs.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb499043.aspx

wedge1988

Look into Frontend and Backend Exchange server topologies & Smart Hosts and Forwarding.

Where i work I have had to configure forwarding for mail to be sent via smart hosts and routing. this will allow you to configure mail setups for two domains.

Simply place one server at the interception point of the mail and tell it to forward mail to which back end server you want it ot (either domain)

hope this helps.

royal

So there are a few things to consider.

The first thing to consider is that you can install Exchange in your domain and give them an administrator account that is delegated Server Administrator privileges.

Another thing to consider is the Address List Segregation setup. This will allow you to create this new company their own GAL, address lists, etc... This is not recommended as a hosting solution, but rather providing different sets of users different address lists. You can check out that whitepaper here.

The true host your own solution is provided by Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration currently in version 4.5. You can check this solution out here.

Another thing you can do is utilize Microsoft Online Service which do provide migration tools to assist you migrating mailbox to Microsoft's own Hosted services. You can check this out here

If you are installing Exchange into a different domain in an entirely different forest than where the users will be, this is known to be a Resource Forest Topology and there are several things to consider. You would still have to replicate somehow (MIIS/IIFP/ETC) the users as either disabled users/contacts and link their user accounts to this disabled account. If the users are in the different domains in the same forest, then it doesn't matter as Exchange is Forest Based. You'd just have to make sure you do a setup.com /preparedomain domainFQDN which will allow you to mailbox enable users in a different domain within the same forest.

Here's a good article about Resource Forests:
http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/planning-architecture/deploying-exchange-resource-forest-part1.html