Exchange Help!

[GlennT]

Hi All,
At the school where I work, we host our own exchange for staff and students. We would like to set up another server to run exchange and offer our feeder primarys email [ 7 schools in total ].
I am guessing that when I suggest this to the county IT guys, they are gonna freak out so I would like to try to find out if anyone either has this in place or has ever done this before and can possibly give me some pointers.
I would like to know....
1) Any easy to use [and preferably cheap ] software that will allow me to sync AD info from the primarys to our domain that won't cause any kind of security problem over the county wan. [not all the primarys servers are 2003 so I'm ruling out ADFS for the moment].
2) Any of the pitfalls i am likely to experience.
We are currently running Exchange 2003 but will be going over to 2007 in the summer.
Many thanks,
Glenn.

[Ric_]

I believe that there is a way to use RPC over HTTP(S) which should alleviate some of the problems with ports and Exchange traffic. I don't know hoe to implement this though.

Another thing to consider is whether you need all the Exchange features or just mail - if it's just mail you could get away with just POP3 or IMAP. You then need only create mail-enabled users in AD and open the relevant port(s). For this you could create an OU or seperate domain where you could import a CSV of usernames.

[djm968]

You can offer a hosted mail solution with exchange 2003 using RPC over HTTP(s) as Ric said. It is a little tricy to configure but well worth the effort.

RPC over HTTP(s) offers full oultook access over any internet connection and you only need to open the standard web ports (80 and 443)

Exchange 2007 using the Edge Transport server role would be a far better option for this kind of solution.

[PiqueABoo]

You only need to open one of those ports and opening it for OWA instead would be easier. It's the client side of RPC over HTTPS that'll bite you, especially when they know it works and now want it from home.

Exchange 2007 using the Edge Transport server role would be a far better option for this kind of solution

Could you explain why? haven't played with one, but I thought that role was basically a glorified SMTP relay.