Exchange contacts and address lists

[sydney_monty]

HI, this is my first post in the forum. I have recently installed our first exchange server 2010 into our domain. Its all up and running with autodiscover, OWA and associated services. So far there has been little headaches! I wanted to ask for some advice on entering contacts and address lists. We are a small private school and we have staff and teachers managing address lists and contacts themselves out of many different email clients. With the install of exchange I want to consolidate this into one or two office staff to manage. I was looking for advice from the community about the best way to handle this. Do I go for Public Folder contact lists with permissions or do I add all the external contacts to exchange and use Distribution lists? Any preference the best?

[SimAda00]

Its more personal preference than anything. You are right that it could be done with public folders but this may be a double edged sword. Whilst they are somewhat a bit more point and click microsoft have been trying to get rid of public folders as a whole. Which is why the public folder management console is not very powerful. That said public folders are back again in Exchange 2013 but only because microsoft have not yet got users to kill them off.

 

If you are going down the mail contacts / distribution lists approach this would give you a lot more control and functionality i.e. moderated distribution lists so messages need approval etc. Along with the usual permissions etc. If you were going with this option the contacts would be visible by all users and you can create multiple address books and address book policies to segregate access to these, so they are distinctly separate from your staff/student address books (but it may be a bit OTT for your environment depending on what you need). The other nice functionality is RBAC (role based access control) - Exchange 2007 onwards works on permissions and role based access so its possible for you to create a role in exchange, and allow users in that role to manage contacts within a certain OU from the exchange control panel (https://domainname.etc/ecp)

 

It comes down to personal preference, longevity and how much control / manageability you want to have.

[sydney_monty]

thanks for the reply. Distribution lists looks to be the preferred approach to me as well. There is a lot to them!

[SimAda00]

Yeah - good luck. If you need any pointers drop me a message.

[sydney_monty]

will do, thanks for your input.....I went with dynamic dist groups with custom attributes.