Rolling out Exchange 2007 to all students

[steele_uk]

We have 1000 exisiting students that i will be giving Exchange mailboxes this year. I am just wondering what tools are available for rolling this out.

They have Mailenable web mail at the moment which will be ditched and i will not be offering to move any exisitng mail.

New students - i think i can script in, but i am not sure how to give existing students mailboxes as simply as possible.

Anyone have ideas how to go about this?

[jsnetman]

Presuming you have active directory you just highlight all of your users and right click choose exchange tasks and then you use the wizard to assign the users mailboxes.

[maniac]

If it's exchange 2003 then you can create the mailboxes in bulk within active directory, providing you have the exchange admin tools installed on the machine your accessing the activedirectory management console on (which can be installed from the exchange setup CD.) It's simply a case of highlighting them all, right hand click, exchange tasks and create new mailbox and follow the wizard through. It will do them all in seconds.

For students to access it I would use the exchange webmail interface, as it will authenticate them automatically without any tricky configuration of outlook etc, and it has all the features they've likely to need.

Mike.

[ahuxham]

When creating new users, ignore scripts. Just create them on AD installed on your mail server (which will replicate onto your DC) When creating, 3/4th box in it asks you if you want to create a mailbox for the user.

Easier if you copy an existing student (as groups, logon script, etc etc are all there, only thing you need to type are username, first/last name, and check for mailbox)

[ezzauk]

If you want to bulk create mailbox's for users on ad in exchange 2007 using the exchange management client you will first need to install exchange 2007 sp1. Then you can create a new mailbox, select all the existing users, apply settings, job done.

Follow this guide for help:
Exchange 2007 SP1 Mailbox Management Features - Part 3: Mailbox-enabling Users in bulk using the Exchange Management Console

If you dont have sp1 installed on exchange 2007 you will need to create a power shell scritp to create the mailbox's, iv gone this before at another college, just when exchange came out, real pain!!!.

Im now looking into moving our students over to exchange 2007, so i will be looking to create an extra 10-15K mailbox's.

Cheers
Ezza