Exchange 2007 - Address book & contacts

[p_baa]

Hi Guys,

I am setting up a new exchange 2007 server to replace an old 2003 box which is failing, my staff have used OWA but the kids have used SquirrelMail to access email via IMAP so that they get a different address list.

I have successfully setup a new GAL for the students and what I want to do is list all of the students (easy bit that works so far) and the staff (the problem). Our staff are in AD with First name & Surname, but it is wanted that staff should appear as Mr F Smith instead of Fred Smith. I don't want to change the users in AD as having their full names in AD is very useful and will be wanted in the Staff Address Book.

I had the thought of using Contacts with just the info in that are needed but I cannot create a contact that has the same email address as a user in AD!

I can continue to grant students access via SquirrelMail but I'd prefer to crack this problem and give them access to the benefits of having OWA access. Any help you can offer would be great.

Thanks

[rh91uk]

I'd also be interested in this aswell if this is possible, thanks.

[maf_001]

The address book is generated from the Display Name attribute in AD, if you where to change the Dispaly Name for your staff it would reflect in your GAL.

This would also reflect in emails, any email sent by a staff member would appear to come from e.g. Mr J Smith

I host Email for allot of schools and most schools are happy with just initial surname, e.g. J Smith.

Hope this helps,

Mark

[p_baa]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your replay, that does offer some help, but I was hoping to find a way of generating 2 GALs one with full names for the staff to use as a number of our staff (especially the TAs) are only known to staff by their first names, but as you point out "Mr A Smith" is exactly what I want to show in the GAL for the students to use.

As always if the teachers weren't so vain and students had more respect it wouldn't be a problem to just have everyone's full names in a single GAL and be done with it, but as I work in a school why should I expect such sense to prevail?

Any thoughts?

Thanks

[maf_001]

You have a few options to get around this, the solution below is how my product configures address books for schools which we have found seems to be the best way around this,

Staff have access to Outlook and OWA
Staff are given access to the default GAL which includes everyone in your school
Staff are given an alias of title.surname e.g. Mr.Smith@yourschooldomain.com


Pupils are give OWA access only,
Pupils are modified using Admodify (or any AD modification tool) to only be allowed to see other pupils in the school. (if you need to know what you need to change to restrict the lookups let me know.)
If pupils then need to contact a member of staff via Email they simply email the teacher as they would call them in lesson, Mr.Smith@schooldomain.com

The only problem with this way is that as soon as the member of staff replies it will return the staff members display name on the email.

They is a few other ways you can maniplulate exchange, if you need anything else let me know.

Mark

[p_baa]

Thanks Mark for the update.

These were the lines I was thinking on, but that still wouldn't give the students an address book with staff showing in the form Mr.Smith@school.com but it is deffinatly closer to a workable solution.

[Edu-IT]

Wondering..

Is it possible for me to split up the Global Address List in Students/Staff etc and if so how would one go about doing this?

[maf_001]

Wondering..

Is it possible for me to split up the Global Address List in Students/Staff etc and if so how would one go about doing this?

Hi,

Yes this is possible but it is more important to understand what you are trying to achieve. Why do you want 2 GAL's? How do your users connect to exchange?

This is what i am guessing,

If you are in a normal school enviroment your staff will be using Outlook and pupils using OWA i would have thought.

To create a new GAL and OAB you need to do the following, the powershell commands are on the end,

Create a new GAL that has just the users you want using: New-GlobalAddressList

Create an Address list with the same name: New-AddressList

Create an offline address book for the new GAL: New-OfflineAddressBook

Once you have done this you should have 3 GALS, addresslists and OAB's

Staff Pupils, and default.

You can force outlook to pickup the staff GAL by using group policy, and the users will be able to see the pupils address list in the dropdown.

If that is what you are aiming to do.

Hope this helps,

Mark
(sorry my spelling is so bad, i am just a bit rushed during the day)

[p_baa]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your help thus far and don't worry about the spelling mine isn't great either.

With the new Exchange 2007 box I am aiming on giving my students access to OWA for the first time in addition to Staff who currently have access to our 2003 OWA.

My thinking with multiple GALs is thus ...

Staff GAL - which has staff & students listed with full first and surname in addition to all distrubtion lists
Student GAL - which is for Students that have only students listed with first and surname and staff in formal format (Mr A Smith) and a very small number of contats/distubution lists.

It would be nice in the long run to be able to give students access via outlook as well as OWA, but moving up to OWA from suqirrel mail as an IMAP front end for students is the first main goal so that the share address book doesn't have to me manualy changed when someone arrives or leaves, or changes jobs as it is soo far out of date it isn't funny!

Sorry to be trying to think outside of the corporate box that the product was designed for, but we're a school so we'll try and make it do much more than originaly designed, just like everyone else here...

Thanks

[Edu-IT]

Wow, if this doesn't give me a headache then nothing will! I thought it would be something simple.

What I was hoping to do was seperate the staff and students, who both have access to OWA externally an Outlook in school.

So if I have understood you correctly:

Create a new GAL that has just the users you want using: New-GlobalAddressList

Create an Address list with the same name: New-AddressList

Create an offline address book for the new GAL: New-OfflineAddressBook

Once you have done this you should have 3 GALS, addresslists and OAB's

New-GlobalAddressList Students
New-AddressList Students
New-OfflineAddressBook Students

New-GlobalAddressList Staff
New-AddressList Staff
New-OfflineAddressBook Staff

That right? Or am I being thick? How do I then control who goes where?

[maf_001]

Wow, if this doesn't give me a headache then nothing will! I thought it would be something simple.

What I was hoping to do was seperate the staff and students, who both have access to OWA externally an Outlook in school.


So if I have understood you correctly:

Create a new GAL that has just the users you want using: New-GlobalAddressList


New-GlobalAddressList Students
New-AddressList Students
New-OfflineAddressBook Students

New-GlobalAddressList Staff
New-AddressList Staff
New-OfflineAddressBook Staff

That right? Or am I being thick? How do I then control who goes where?

If you open Exchange Powershell and type

get-help New-GlobalAddressList it will tell you how to add a recipient filter.

You can control the OWA addy lookup by changing the msExchQueryBaseDN vaule in AD for your users

This is a OU lookup, e.g. OU=Students,Ou=Users,DC=Mydomain,DC=com for students
OU=Staff,Ou=Users,DC=Mydomain,DC=com for staff assuming your users are in OU's like this

Users -> Pupils
-> Staff

if you set this to a root OU it will search all the sub ous for mail enabled users
So as above your staff would be looking at the Staff OU and would see only staff and your pupils would be lokoing in Students for users.

The Gals are for Outlook distribution, if you want to seperate them it comes under the Exchange Hosted setup, because you are trying to sperate the users as if they where in a different company. This is a massive config change and is very hard to keep up with. I would reccommend allowing your pupils OWA only access and staff access to both.

This is a bit of a pain to get working and manage but can be configured to be all scripted, let me know if you need anymore help,

Hope this Helps

Mark