Exchange Server 2003 : Creating and Managing Address Lists and Recipient Policies (part 2) - Administering Address Lists

3/8/2011 3:49:07 PM

Administering Address Lists

Creating and modifying address lists is the majority of the administrative work involved in managing address lists. However, you can perform additional administrative tasks to administer an address list. One is to configure access permissions for an address list, and another is to override address list update scheduling by forcing an immediate update.

Setting Permissions on Address Lists

By default, all users in an organization can access all address lists (the Authenticated Users group has List Contents permission). There might be situations where you want to restrict access to a particular address list, such as to keep users from using an executive management address list to e-mail all executives easily. Denying access to an address list does not prevent users from e-mailing the recipients in the address list by other means, such as selecting them from the GAL, but it does prevent them from seeing a particular address list when they are using Outlook.

To set permissions for an address list, perform the following steps:

1.	Right-click the address list in Exchange System Manager and click Properties.
2.	Click the Security tab, shown in Figure 5, which shows the users and groups with configured permissions and what those permissions are. Figure 5. The security properties of an address list
3.	A gray check box means that the permissions have been inherited from a higher level object, in this case the All Address Lists container. You can add users and groups and configure their permissions or change the permissions for existing users and groups that are listed.

Setting permissions must be done carefully because group membership can cause unintended results. This is especially true when you use the explicit Deny permission rather than unselecting Allow.

Important

If the address list is part of an offline address list that a user has permission to download, they will be able to access the address list offline. This is true even if they have been explicitly denied permission online.

Updating an Address List Manually

Normally when you make changes to an address list, the changes are replicated to other Exchange servers in the organization by the Recipient Update Service. This replication occurs on a configurable schedule. There are times when you do not want to wait until the next scheduled update takes place, so Exchange Server 2003 allows you to force an immediate update manually.

To update an address list manually, perform the following steps:

1.	Expand the Recipients container in Exchange System Manager.
2.	Click the Recipient Update Services container. Notice that there are two default Recipient Update Services: one for the domain and one for the enterprise. The enterprise Recipient Update Service is responsible for updating system objects such as the Message Transfer Agent and the System Attendant. The domain Recipient Update Service updates recipient objects.
3.	Right-click the Recipient Update Service for the domain and click Update Now. This will force any address list changes to be replicated immediately. Alternatively, you can click Rebuild, which rather than just updating changes will rebuild all the address lists.

Managing a Recipient Update Service

The Recipient Update Service exists to ensure that address list memberships are accurate by updating them across the organization to reflect any changes that are made. You need to have a Recipient Update Service for each domain in an Exchange Server 2003 organization. However, that is the minimum requirement. You can have multiple Recipient Update Services in a domain, and it is useful to do so if you have a domain that spans multiple Active Directory sites. Whether you are creating a new Recipient Update Service or modifying an existing one, the configuration options are similar. Figure 6 shows what the Recipient Update Services Properties dialog box looks like. To reach this dialog box, expand the Recipient Update Services container in Exchange System Manager, and then right-click Recipient Update Service in the contents pane and click Properties.

Figure 6. The Recipient Update Service Properties

The options you can configure are as follows:

Domain The domain that the Recipient Update Service is responsible for.
Exchange Server The Exchange server that the Recipient Update Service runs on.
Windows Domain Controller The domain controller that the Recipient Update Service will contact and communicate with when making updates to Active Directory.
Update Interval The schedule that the Recipient Update Service will use to update address lists. The default setting is Always Run, which means that whenever a change is made, the Recipient Update Service will make the update immediately. You can click the drop-down menu to choose a different interval or click Customize to create a custom schedule. The Always Run setting can create a lot of network traffic if frequent changes are made to address lists, which can have undesirable effects on performance.

A Recipient Update Service is created automatically in a domain when Exchange Server 2003 is installed, if there isn’t one already. In domains where there are no Exchange Server 2003 servers but there are Exchange Server 5.5 servers that are part of the organization, you must create a Recipient Update Service for that domain. To do so, you must first run DomainPrep in the domain. Then start Exchange System Manager, right-click Recipient Update Services, point to New, and then click Recipient Update Service. Select the destination domain for the Recipient Update Service and complete the other fields previously listed, as required.