Exchange Server 2003 : Creating and Managing Address Lists and Recipient Policies (part 1) - Creating and Modifying Address Lists

3/8/2011 3:48:09 PM

Creating and Modifying Address Lists

Address lists are a convenient way of filtering the GAL into more manageable groupings. Address lists are different from distribution groups in that there is no “membership” in an address list like there is in a group. Address lists are formed through LDAP queries that filter the display of the Exchange organization based on criteria you define. You primarily find address lists used in large Exchange organizations that contain thousands of users and many physical locations. For example, contoso.com has 10,000 entries in the GAL (mailbox-enabled users, mail-enabled users, contacts, and groups). The company has 20 physical locations with roughly 500 employees and contractors at each location. Most users communicate only with users at their own location. Rather than a user having to navigate the 10,000-entry GAL, you could use address lists to filter the GAL to only the users in a given location. That would considerably reduce the number of entries displayed to a user, making the address list more efficient to use.

Another situation in which you would use an address list is when you want to be able to locate users quickly by their group membership but where a distribution list wouldn’t be appropriate. An example is an address list that filters all of the Sales staff globally for Contoso into a single list. This would allow the vice president of Sales and others to access a complete list of salespeople throughout Contoso without having to e-mail an entire distribution list.

Creating an Address List

Address lists are created using the Exchange System Manager. When you start Exchange System Manager, click the Recipients container. There are three subcontainers related to address lists: All Address Lists, All Global Address Lists, and Offline Address Lists. When Exchange Server 2003 is installed and an organization is created, the following default address lists are created:

All Address Lists
- All Contacts
- All Groups
- All Users
- Public Folders
All Global Address Lists
- Default Global Address List
Offline Address Lists
- Default Offline Address List

For small to medium-sized Exchange Server 2003 organizations, these default lists are often sufficient. Large organizations will likely need additional address lists to address specific needs. Creating an address list begins by determining what type of address list it will be and therefore which of the three address list containers to place it in. The process of creating an address list in the All Address Lists container is as follows:

1.	Right-click All Address Lists, point to New, and click Address List.
2.	Type in a name for the address list that describes its function.
3.	Click Filter Rules to open the Find Exchange Recipients dialog box.
4.	By default, all Exchange recipients will be included in the filter, so click the Advanced tab to narrow the criteria.
5.	Click the Field menu, and then select a recipient type (User, Contact, Public Folder, or Group) and the attribute you want to filter by (such as Department).
6.	Type a value for the attribute. For example, if you chose Department, you could type sales.
7.	Click Add to add the attribute to the Condition list. Click OK, and then click Finish to create the address list.

Another option you can filter for is related to mailbox-enabled users. By clicking the Storage tab on the Find Exchange Recipients dialog box, you can select whether to include mailboxes on all servers in the Exchange organization, only mailboxes on a specific server, or only mailboxes in a specific mailbox store.

After you create the address list, you will see it in the container in Exchange System Manager. Right-click the address lists and click Properties. This opens a Properties dialog box, like the one shown in Figure 1 , which shows you the LDAP query being used to generate the address list.

Figure 1. The LDAP query for an address list

In this example, the address list is filtering for all users that have a Department attribute of sales. By clicking Preview, you can see how the address list will appear when a user selects it in Outlook. Figure 2 shows an example of a previewed address list.

Figure 2. Previewing an address list

Modifying an Address List

There are times when you will need to modify an address list. Perhaps you previewed the address list you just created, and the results were not what you intended. Or you may have an existing list that you need to modify to be more or less inclusive, such as a situation where you had an address list that included users as well as contacts, and now you want it to include only users. Rather than having to delete the address list and recreate it from scratch, Exchange Server 2003 allows you to modify an address list and make changes.

To modify an address list, perform the following steps:

Right-click it in Exchange System Manager and click Properties. This opens the Properties dialog box, like the one in Figure 1.

Click Modify. This opens the same Find Exchange Recipients dialog box that you used in creating the address list. Figure 3 shows the General tab, where you can limit the types of recipients you want to include in the filter. This is useful if you want to exclude certain types, such as contacts. Figure 4 shows the Advanced tab, where you can specify the attributes and values that you want to filter for.