Exchange Design Help   

Hi All,

I would like to deploy Exchange 2003 in our company but I have a little 
unique situation with our infrastructure and wanted to get some input from 
you’ll. 

What I want: 
Use Exchange for our company for calendaring use only so people can schedule 
meetings and send invitations.

Situation: 
We are running Active Directory with Exchange 2003 and are only using the 
Public Folders feature as of now. Upper management has decided that they wish 
to use the full functions of Exchange calendaring with private mailbox 
calendars instead of local Outlook calendars stored in .pst files. However, 
our backend infrastructure is all Unix based and we currently don’t run any 
mail servers for mail except to forward. So if our company’s domain is 
r1.company.com all email gets forwarded to users who have a parent company 
accounts at hq.company.com. On top of that, not all users are Outlook users. 
Email clients range from Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, to Netscape. 
This really isn’t a problem since users who don’t use Outlook can login to 
Outlook Web Access to accept/decline meeting requests. The problem is that 
how will these users get notified of meeting requests. If I send a meeting 
request to president@r1.company.com which gets forwarded to 
president@hq.company.com and they don’t use Outlook, they won’t be able to 
see a meeting request even if they login to Outlook Web Access since our 
Exchange won’t be using email and even if it did, it is not the mail server 
for hq.company.com.
 
I know this all sounds a bit confusing but I myself am a bit confused too 
due to the various obstacles. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!

date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:18:00 -0700   author:   BishopZ

Re: Exchange Design Help   

By using Exchange for Calendaring only and using mail hosted elsewhere, you 
are underutilizing Exchange Server and the investments made in it. Perhaps 
you should look at other solutions that may better serve your purpose.

If there are no specific barriers to using Exchange's full functionality, it 
probably makes sense to look into using Exchange's full functionality, 
including messaging/email.
-- 
Bharat Suneja
MVP - Exchange
www.zenprise.com
NEW blog location:
exchangepedia.com/blog
----------------------------


"BishopZ"  wrote in message 
news:98163411-6EBD-426D-A68E-245E9A9D2F19@microsoft.com...
> Hi All,
>
> I would like to deploy Exchange 2003 in our company but I have a little
> unique situation with our infrastructure and wanted to get some input from
> you’ll.
>
> What I want:
> Use Exchange for our company for calendaring use only so people can 
> schedule
> meetings and send invitations.
>
> Situation:
> We are running Active Directory with Exchange 2003 and are only using the
> Public Folders feature as of now. Upper management has decided that they 
> wish
> to use the full functions of Exchange calendaring with private mailbox
> calendars instead of local Outlook calendars stored in .pst files. 
> However,
> our backend infrastructure is all Unix based and we currently don’t run 
> any
> mail servers for mail except to forward. So if our company’s domain is
> r1.company.com all email gets forwarded to users who have a parent company
> accounts at hq.company.com. On top of that, not all users are Outlook 
> users.
> Email clients range from Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, to 
> Netscape.
> This really isn’t a problem since users who don’t use Outlook can login to
> Outlook Web Access to accept/decline meeting requests. The problem is that
> how will these users get notified of meeting requests. If I send a meeting
> request to president@r1.company.com which gets forwarded to
> president@hq.company.com and they don’t use Outlook, they won’t be able to
> see a meeting request even if they login to Outlook Web Access since our
> Exchange won’t be using email and even if it did, it is not the mail 
> server
> for hq.company.com.
>
> I know this all sounds a bit confusing but I myself am a bit confused too
> due to the various obstacles. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!
>

date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:07:23 -0700   author:   Bharat Suneja [MVP]