Exchange Server 2007 : Work with Address Lists

• Default Global Address List— Shows all mail-enabled users, contacts, groups, and resource mailboxes in your organization. Almost anything that has an email address in your organization is automatically added to the Global Address List (GAL).

• All Contacts— For mail-enabled contacts. You can hide these from the address lists if you like by going into the properties of the contact and on the General tab, selecting the option to Hide from Exchange Address Lists.

• All Groups— For mail-enabled groups (for example, distribution groups).

• All Rooms— For those resource mailboxes that relate to rooms that can be scheduled or reserved.

• All Users— Shows your mail-enabled users without all the extras you usually see in your GAL.

• Public Folders— Shows all the Public Folders in the organization.

As an administrator, you view your address list information through the Organization Configuration/Mailbox node under the Address Lists tab. From here, you can perform a variety of address list maintenance, editing, adding, and removing.

Create an Address List

You have the ability to structure your mail-enabled objects into customized address lists based upon specific attributes that can be populated dynamically. To create an address list, perform the following:

Apply Address Lists

An address list is usually “applied” when the filter rule has been edited, unless you make a request for the list to be applied manually. The idea of applying the list is that the membership is updated to include new recipients and remove those that are no longer in harmony with the criteria.

To apply an address list, perform the following steps:

Edit Address Lists

To edit an address list after it has been created, perform the following steps:

Preview Members of an Address List

You can always review the members of an address list by editing the list and on the Conditions screen clicking the Preview button to see which objects are part of the list.

Another approach is through the EMS. For example, if you want to find the same list, you first need to retrieve some information from the Address List called the Distinguished Name. To do this for a list called Research in an organization called PrimaTech, you type the following:

Get-AddressList -Identity "Research" | fl DistinguishedName

You can see in Figure 1 that the response provided is quite long. You will need that response when typing in the Get-Recipient cmdlet using the Distinguished Name as the filter. To retrieve the list, you type:

Get-Recipient -Filter {AddressListMembership -eq 'CN=Research,CN=All Address Lists,
CN=Address Lists Container,CN=PrimaTech,CN=MicrosoftExchange,
CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=primatech,DC=com'}


					  

Figure 1. Previewing address list members in the EMS.

Multiple Global Address Lists

Ordinarily, the GAL, which houses all your email-enabled objects, is sufficient for your organization. Whether it is a small organization or a large one, rarely do you require more than one GAL. No matter how many you create, your users can see only one.

Possible reasons for creating additional GALs include the following:

• You have a single Exchange server organization hosting multiple companies within and users need to see only the GAL for the company for which they work.

• You have a large company that has multiple branch offices and you want to ensure users see only a subset of the organization based upon location.

Creating the additional GALs is done through the EMS. Creating them isn’t difficult; the important part is to follow up with assigned permissions so that users will see the GAL you’ve created as opposed to the default GAL.

Create a Global Address List

To create additional GALs, perform the following steps:

We have created a new GAL with the name we’ve chosen. This won’t provide us any recipient or conditional filter properties for that GAL. So, let’s say you specifically want to create a GAL called CompanyTwo and you want all mailbox users that have their Company condition set to CompanyTwo. To do this, type:

New-GlobalAddressList -Name "CompanyTwo" -ConditionalCompany "CompanyTwo" -IncludedRecipients "MailboxUsers"

					  

However, you might notice that the GAL does not update as quickly as you would like.

Update the Global Address Lists More Rapidly

If you want to speed up the process of the GAL updating its recipients, type the following:

Update-GlobalAddressList "Name of List"

Or, if you want all of your GALs to update (not that you would have too many of them), type the following:

Get-GlobalAddressList | Update-GlobalAddressList

Configuring Clients to Use One GAL or Another

Having your name be a part of a specially created GAL is one thing. If you meet the criteria, you are included in the list. However, for clients to see one GAL over another, some changes have to be made. By default, all clients choose the default GAL. To change this, we need to open the ADSI Edit tool. To do this, go to the Start button, click Administrative Tools, and then click ADSI Edit.

Imagine we have a secondary GAL called CompanyTwo. To ensure access to one GAL over another, we use permissions. You might want to create two security groups: one for the default GAL and the other for the C2 GAL that you can organize objects into each group.

From within ADSI Edit, if you enter the Configuration and navigate to Services, Microsoft Exchange, the Organization Name, Address Lists Container, All Global Address Lists, you can see in Figure 2 that in this case we have two GALs.

Figure 2. Using ADSI Edit to determine GAL permissions.

To configure access, you can right-click the GAL and go into the Properties. Select the Security tab. If you select Authenticated Users, you will see they have the Read and Open address list permissions. Clear these items for authenticated users and add the users or group to your permission settings with the Read and Open address list permissions.

Perform the same task for the default GAL. Clear all authenticated users, just assign the security group with the users you wish to have access.