Live@Edu + SAS Mail Users

[PiqueABoo]

[This sub-forum has "Exchange" in the description, so I guess here will do]

 

Has anyone seriously played with shared address space? I've just started testing what you can/can't do *without* putting the syncing s/w on your domain (which is all the MS configuration doc I found talks about.. briefly). So it's fiddling with powershell remoting and I've happily made it relay to the other side of the SAS "partnership" by making one of those mailbox-less "Mail Users". To do that I used:

 

New-MailUser to make the mail user

Set-MailUser - to subsequently give them the right (I think!) "proxy addresses" in the right place.

 

It worked, but I can't help wondering if I'm going about it the long way and whether you can do it all with just the New- cmdlet. Can't see it myself, but does anyone know better?

[PiqueABoo]

Looks like the correct answer is "no". Was just looking at the PowerShell Toolkit for Outlook Live which is essentially a C# wrapper for the powershell. That has a CreateMailUser() function that internally runs New-MailUser followed by a few Set-MailUser commands.

[PiqueABoo]

I've still got a few rough edges to tinker with. I was trying the "everything goes to Live@Edu first and any without mailboxes there are relayed to school" scenario, where for this experiment the school-side was an old E2K3 box:

 

Fiddling with the E2K3 accounts via recipient policy to add/change the addresses wasn't too bad, but I'm aware of a couple of schools where they have manually created staff mail addresses with random numbers on the front (these are different from staff logons and their theory is that the kids won't be able to guess & abuse staff e-mail addresses) - haven't thought it through, but suspect this part would be harder for them and might require ADModify or script or something.

 

Creating the Live@Edu MailUsers is where I came in: Needs a little powershell script, but wouldn't be that difficult to do in bulk with a CSV. And of course in principle you can buy, configure and use ILM/Syncing for this.

 

Setting up a new SMTP connector for the shared address on the E2K3 was temporarily "fun" - you're supposed to point that at the MX for the shared address (a Live@Edu FQDN) but that name begins with a number and the relevant bit of the E2K3 interface will not accept FQDNs that begin with a number! So I eventually made and used a number-free DNS CNAME that points to the number-tainted MX instead. I don't yet understand why you need this connector at all, but for a first pass I decided to do things the MS way...

 

...but having said that, the key departure is that I did all of this with *additional* Live@Edu accepted domains which bear no relation to the domain used to create the Live@Edu tenancy i.e. SAS does not appear to be restricted to just the tenancy domain.

 

Summary: SAS now works for me, but took a fair bit of thought in places and I suspect some of it might go ::whoosh:: over some heads.