Re: Guideline for Exchange server in branch office -- PCTECH

On 3/24/2009 2:00 PM, Lukas Beeler arranged the binary bits such that:

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 19:46, Roger Vicker, CCP <rv-tech@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am looking for some better (more up to date...) guidelines for setting
up an Exchange server on SBS 2008 for a remote branch office where the
internet domain is hosted elsewhere on a Linux server. The branch is
pretty much a stand alone server and since the main email is hosted on
Linux there is no Exchange to Exchange configuration chance.

Sorry, but i'm not sure if i understand correctly what you're trying to say.

Your have a domain example.com. Currently, everything for example.com
including Mail, Web and DNS is hosted on a Linux machine. You want to
reconfigure that to

Not exactly but lets say the above is so. Plus only a few of the email
users above are going to be in the new branch office. The rest of the
organization would continue to access the MAIN mail server from their
various locations. (No shouting just emphasis.) It is possible that over
time other branches would go the same way but there will only be one
internet domain (example.com) for everywhere and the server pointed to
by the DNS MX entry will not be Exchange.

I would like to setup this branch office's Exchange server for just the
local users to be able to send and receive their email via Outlook 2007
via Exchange via the MAIN mail server that is not Exchange.

a) retrieve certain mailboxes from the Linux machine using POP3

This is what I have read so far but seems to be different (missing or
needs 3rd party) with SBS 2008. BTW the MAIN mail server keeps each mail
box/address separate. It doesn't aggregate several addresses into one
POP3 account as it sounds like some of the examples expect Exchange to
retrieve from.

b) reconfigure the Linux machine to point the MX entries directly to
the Exchange server

No. The MX entry would have to stay as is since the MAIN mail server is
going to remain as is and continue to serve other mail boxes besides the
few at the branch. I can setup a DNS A record for remote.example.com to
point to the branch so the users would then be able to go to
https://remote.example.com/exchange to access OWA on the branch office
server.

The alternative is to not use Exchange at all in the branch's SBS 2008
and just configure Outlook 2007 to IMAP to the MAIN mail server but that
looses some of the features that can be handled instead by adding a
client backup of its PST files and a few other configs/training. OWA
would also be lost.

I'm not sure where the branch/main office stuff comes into play - do
you have multiple domains? branch-example.com and hq-example.com? Or
do you want to share a single SMTP Namespace like example.com between
the Linux box and Exchange?

How many Exchange servers do you intend to have? Since youre speaking
SBS, my assumption is that you're only going to have a single Exchange
server in the HQ that runs on the SBS machine? Is that correct?

Only one Exchange server, in the branch, none at the main servers for
the singular domain. They don't want users being
abc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, abd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx just abc@xxxxxxxxxxx,
abd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Also, some other questions:

Will there be a VPN connection between the branch office and the HQ?

No VPN available. Another long discussion...

Will the clients in the branch office be domain joined?

They will be joined to the MS Domain (branch.example.local) of the
server located in that branch.

Sorry for asking that many questions in return, but i just can't get a
clear picture of what you're trying to accomplish.

No apologies needed. From what I have read, this is not an uncommon
configuration but also not a common configuration either.

Roger