Exchange 2007 - Staff and Students on the GAL

[FragglePete]

Installed Exchange 2007 back in Easter and Migrated Staff over to the new box. Using the old e-mail server as a sort of 'smart host' for Staff members while students still use it.

2007 proving very popular with staff, and with me writing a weekly series of 'tips 'n' tricks' of what you can do with OWA and Outlook its gone very well and I'm very pleased with it.

I'm planning on migrating the students over to it over Summer, but now thinking about the whole GAL thing.

Staff are liking seeing all other staff members on the Global Address List and being able to resolve other users from personal details, and when I move over the Students to Exchange they will appear on the GAL to which will make it look very very busy.

I know you can add an additional GAL under Exchange 2007, and was thinking have seperate ones for Staff and Students, but not sure how it would work. Or if it would be a good idea or not?

Just wondering how others do it? Do you just lump all staff and students together? I have seperate information stores for each group if this will make any difference.

Thanks in advance, as always

Pete

[teddybear]

This may be useful, scroll down a wee bit and it mentions custom address lists.

Understanding Address Lists

Don't suppose you kept a copy of the tips n tricks you sent out? Wouldn't mind having a wee look if that's ok with you :-)

[FragglePete]

Yeah. Will do. I'll create some PDF's and post.

Pete

[TimH]

I know you can add an additional GAL under Exchange 2007, and was thinking have seperate ones for Staff and Students, but not sure how it would work. Or if it would be a good idea or not?

Just wondering how others do it? Do you just lump all staff and students together? I have seperate information stores for each group if this will make any difference.

We used to have separate global address lists for staff and each year of entry group (e.g. 2008, 2007 etc.). Not sure if it's because of the way we use it but each user has to be able to see themselves in a global address list, i.e. you can't have a single global address list of just staff without (at least) one for students.

This made the world tidy, each student just saw in the GAL their peer group, this was carried over when we moved to Exchange 2007 earlier this year.

However, recently I've removed all of the separate GALs, as maintaining them in Exchange 2007 is more awkward than 2003. Our old "year of entry" were based on group membership which is tricky to achieve in Exchange 2007, also the update of address lists is no longer automatic so it meant that when changes were applied we needed to refresh the appropriate list.

So far we've had no real complaints (or even comments) about having a list with the whole school on (I'm still waiting!). If you need to find someone just put their name in the search box.

tim