Franchise Hosted Exchange Solution Version 1.0 Nigel Webster September 2008 P a g e 1
1. Contents 1. Contents... 2 2. Background... 3 3. Customer Hierarchy... 4 4. Overview of the Hosted Exchange Solution... 5 1. The Hosted Exchange Solution assumes all existing partners are using Exchange 2007... 5 2. Shared Address Lists.... 5 3. Offline Address List.... 6 4. OWA Address List... 6 5. Global Distribution Groups.... 7 5. Create Head Office Customer... 8 6. Create other Organisations... 9 7. Hosted Exchange Properties to be Overwritten... 11 8. OWA Address List and OAB Address List Properties... 13 9. Create the Exchange Address Lists... 16 1. Create the Head Office Address list manually.... 16 2. Create Address lists for the Partners... 17 3. Set the permissions to the Head Office Address List... 19 10. Create the Reseller Hosted Exchange Service... 21 11. Create the Head Office Hosted Exchange.... 24 12. Provision Service to Partners and Sub-Customers... 26 13. Process for adding a new Partner Office... 27 Copyright 2008 EMS-Cortex Limited. This document is the property of EMS-Cortex Ltd and may not be disclosed or copied to a third party, other than to any wholly owned subsidiary of EMS-Cortex Ltd, without consent. All rights reserved. P a g e 2
2. Background This document is aimed at a customer of EMS-Cortex using the Cortex Administration Portal to assist in providing Hosted Exchange services to their partners in a franchise type environment. It covers the situation of a customer having a Head Office, but also a number of other partners who are related to each other but all operate independently. An overview of the Hierarchy is set discussed in section 3. This document outlines the steps necessary to create a Microsoft Hosted Exchange Solution that enables users in one of the customer s offices to see the users in an address list of another office. P a g e 3
3. Customer Hierarchy In implementing the solution to provide management of a customer s Global Distribution Groups it must be noted that Cortex searches for possible members of a distribution group only in the Customer s OU. For this reason it is recommended that the customer s organisations are created in a hierarchal structure similar to the diagram below: To do this you need to create a top level organisation and within this document, this organisation will be known as Head Office. This customer must be the reseller of all other organisations below it. Underneath the Head Office organisation, you need to create sub level organisations, and, within this document, these organisations are known as Partner Offices. Head Office and Partner Offices is collectively known as the Customer. This scenario enables each organisation (also referred to as an office) to manage their own users on an individual basis. P a g e 4
4. Overview of the Hosted Exchange Solution 1. The Hosted Exchange Solution assumes all existing partners are using Exchange 2007 The solution relies on all the partners using Exchange 2007 so any existing partners need to be migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. The process for doing this is not included in this document. 2. Shared Address Lists. In this solution it has been decided that the Global Address List for the customer should still be created and managed by Cortex in the usual manner. This means that the users who log in to Outlook will first see just users (and other mail enabled objects) in their own office in the Global Address List. It is a requirement that all of the customers users are able to see an address list showing all the other office s users. In this solution the address lists for the customers are created manually and the Cortex Hosted Exchange Service is overwritten so that Cortex does not manage the Address Lists for these offices. This part of the solution relies on the Exchange 2007 feature which automatically updates the showinaddressbook property of the users. If you are using Exchange 2003 then you need to turn on the Recipient Update Service and you should seek further advice from EMS-cortex on this issue. A top level Address List will be created which includes all users in the Customer. Under that there will be an address list for each office. This gives Outlook users the ability to search for other address lists which would look something like the following screen shot: P a g e 5
3. Offline Address List The Offline Address list points at the Address list containing all the Customer s users. 4. OWA Address List The query used to show the Address List in OWA also points at the Address List containing all users in the Customer. This gives the following address list for our test user: P a g e 6
5. Global Distribution Groups. The queries that Cortex uses for finding possible members of Distribution Groups can be overwritten for each office. Doing this and having the Head Office customer as a reseller for the partner s offices means that a Cortex administrative user in Head Office can create Distribution groups which contain users from all the offices. For example: P a g e 7
5. Create Head Office Customer You need to create a Customer for the top or Head Office level. This customer can be created through Cortex in the normal way. Once this is done Head Office needs to be made a reseller. There are three pre-requisites: 1. It needs to be able to resell all the services that the Customer s Partners offices are going to have and also all the services that any of the Partners may resell. 2. It needs to have the same set of Access Levels (especially for the Hosted Exchange service) for all the services that all the Partners offices have for the services. 3. The administrator user for this customer needs to be given the RESELLER - Reseller Full Administrator role to allow it to administrate partner s offices. P a g e 8
6. Create other Organisations To provision the Partner offices, you need to impersonate the administrator user in the Head Office customer and create the Partner offices while impersonating this user. This ensures that the Partner offices are created underneath the Head Office organisation. P a g e 9
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7. Hosted Exchange Properties to be Overwritten There are some properties of the Hosted Exchange service that need to be overwritten at a customer level. To do this: 1. Go to the Operational Support System Manager Services menu and select the Hosted Exchange service 2. Select the Service Settings link: 3. Select the Service-Customer properties of the service: 4. Expand the + next to the property you are configuring and modify the permissions so that they look like below: P a g e 11
Do this for the properties named: a. The Exchange Contact Filter b. The Distribution Group Filter c. The Public Folder Filter d. The User Filter 5. There are other properties that need to have the permission applied to overwritten similar to the above properties. However these properties only need to be allowed to be overwritten to the Reseller service level. For these properties, the Permission looks like the screen shot below: The properties involved are: a. Exchange Address List Pattern b. OAB Address List c. OWA Address List P a g e 12
8. OWA Address List and OAB Address List Properties It is possible that the OWA Address List and OAB Address List properties do not exist for the Hosted Exchange service in your instance. If this is so then use the following instructions to add the properties to your Hosted Exchange service. To do this: 1. Go to the Operational Support System Manager Services menu and select the Hosted Exchange service 2. Select the Property Management link: 3. Select the Service-Customer properties of the service: 4. Select the New Property link and create a new property. The Property DB Name has to be OWAAddressList to match the rules above but the other values can be whatever makes sense for the service: P a g e 13
5. Select save and then Select the Property Management link to close this screen and open up the Service Settings link to configure the permissions for the property so that it appears at the Customer level: Note: The name of the property will be the Property Label specified above. P a g e 14
Adding the OAB Address List property is the same as above except that the recommended property values are: Note: You can alter the Property Label and the description as you see fit but the Property DB Name field must be exactly as recorded here or the Provisioning Rules will not find the property correctly. P a g e 15
9. Create the Exchange Address Lists The Head Office Address List is created manually so that it includes all users in the Head Office customer and all users in the Partner Offices. In addition there will be sub-address lists created for each Partner Office. However, if the Partner Office is a reseller then the Sub-Organisations Address Lists is created by Cortex as per normal. This means that the Address lists will look something like: In this example, we have used the Head Office name for the Address List but you should use whatever will be the most sensible name for your users to see. To do this: 1. Create the Head Office Address list manually. 1. Create the Address List manually at the Address List root using the Exchange 2. Update the Address list conditions to look like the screen shot below: P a g e 16
The numbers that the Custom Attribute 15 equals are the CustomerIDs for all the relevant offices. The CustomerIDs can be discovered by running the following query in SQL: Select Label, CustomerID FROM OLM..Customers WHERE Label like %{customername}% The CustomerID field value is the value that should be used in this address list. 2. Create Address lists for the Partners Each Partner will have an address list created under the Head Office Address created above. To do this, use the Exchange 2007 Management console and create an address list. The steps should be: 1. Create the New Address list Note: Depending on your Cortex configuration, you might need to click Browse to select the appropriate address list container. 2. When you get to the Filter section of the New Address List wizard, you might wish to select the appropriate recipient types that will be included in the address list which, by default, will include all recipient types. This is optional. You must however, specify the correct Custom Attribute 15 values by clicking the appropriate select condition check box and then clicking the Specified link to specify the value to be the CustomerID of the particular office. P a g e 17
3. Enter the value to be the CustomerID of the relevant office P a g e 18
4. Save the Address List 5. Repeat for all the organisations directly below Head Office (i.e. all Partners) 3. Set the permissions to the Head Office Address List The users in the Head Office and every Partner Office need to have access to all the Address Lists. To achieve this, Cortex uses the Proxy XXX Users group (where XXX is Cortex s short name for the customer). To do this: 1. Open the ADSIEdit application on a server. Find the address lists in the following path Configuration\Services\Microsoft Exchange\<Exchange Organisation>\Address Lists Container\All Address Lists\{customername}. 2. Right clicking on the Head Office address list and selecting properties will enable you to set the permissions to the address lists. 3. Break the inheritance of permissions to the Head Office Address List. 4. Remove the following permissions that are automatically added to the Head Office Address List: a. Everyone b. Authenticated Users P a g e 19
5. For the Head Office address list you should give each Proxy XXX Users group for the Head Office and every Partner Office permission to it. The standard permissions of read and Open Address List are sufficient. P a g e 20
10. Create the Reseller Hosted Exchange Service In this step you need to prevision (or edit) the Template Service that the Head Office customer provides for the Partner Office customers. The ability to create template services that the reseller sells gives us the opportunity to set the properties at this level which is inherited by all the Partner Office customers. To do this you provision (or re-provision) the Reseller service for the Head Office customer (also for the correct location if there are more than one location available) in the same way as usual except that in addition you edit the properties on the Hosted Exchange service so that all the offices have the same properties set automatically. To do this: 1. Edit the Reseller Service for Head Office: P a g e 21
2. Expand the Hosted Exchange Service Link and select Service Settings and the Category of Customer: P a g e 22
3. Update the Following Properties: a. Blank out the Exchange Address List Pattern b. Edit the OAB Address List to be the name of the Head Office Address list c. Edit the OWA Address List to be the name of the Head Office Address list 4. Make sure that you save the changes and also provision the service P a g e 23
11. Create the Head Office Hosted Exchange. The next step is to create the Hosted Exchange service for the Head Office customer. To do this you provision the customer with Hosted Exchange service in the normal way except that to enable the global distribution groups by the customer there are some properties that have to be overwritten for this customer. To do this: 1. Edit the Hosted Exchange Service for the customer. 2. Select Advanced Settings then Service Settings and also change the drop down list to be Customer properties: 3. Edit the Address List Filter to be: -ConditionalCustomAttribute15 (ID1,ID2,...) Where ID1 is the CustomerID of one partner customer and ID2 of another and so on until all the partner customers IDs (including the Head Office top level customer) should be included. 4. Edit the Users Filter to be: (&( (ExtensionAttribute15=ID1)(extensionAttribute15=ID2)..)(objectClass=user)(display Name=*)(mail=*)(proxyaddresses=*)) Where ID1 is the CustomerID of one partner customer and ID2 of another and so on repeating the bracketed section until all the customers IDs (including the Head Office top level customer) should be included. As an example where there are 3 sub-customers: (&( (ExtensionAttribute15=40)(extensionAttribute15=41)(extensionAttribute15=42)(exte nsionattribute15=43))(objectclass=user)(displayname=*)(mail=*)(proxyaddresses=*)) 5. The Contacts Filter Property needs to be overwritten to be: (&( (ExtensionAttribute15=ID1)(extensionAttribute15=ID2)..)(objectClass=contact)(disp layname=*)) Where ID1 is the CustomerID of one partner customer and ID2 of another and so on repeating the bracketed section until all the customers IDs (including the Head Office P a g e 24
top level customer) should be included. 6. The Distribution Group Filter Property needs to be overwritten to be: (&( (ExtensionAttribute15=ID1)(extensionAttribute15=ID2)..)(objectClass=group)(mailNi ckname=*)(displayname=*)) Where ID1 is the CustomerID of one partner customers and ID2 of another and so on repeating the bracketed section until all the Office Data customers IDs (including the Head Office top level customer) should be included. P a g e 25
12. Provision Service to Partners and Sub-Customers The partners can now be provisioned with the Hosted Exchange service. These services can be given to users as well. P a g e 26
13. Process for adding a new Partner Office Once this is configured correctly it will work for adding users to all the existing Partner Office users. However you want to add a new Partner Office to this there is some re-configuration to do: 1. Create the new Partner Office customer. See section 6 Create other OrganisationsCreate the Exchange Address Lists. 2. Edit the Head Office Address List to include the extensionattribute15 relating to the new customer. See section 9 Create the Exchange Address Lists. 3. Manually add the Address List for the Partner Office customer. See section 9 Create the Exchange Address Lists. 4. Edit the Filters for the Head Office customer s Hosted Exchange Service to include the new (extensionattribute15=id) filter relating to the new Partner Office customer. This has to be done for all the filters mentioned in Section 11 Create the Head Office Hosted Exchange. P a g e 27