Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Configuring Delegate Access on Exchange (Part 2)


Yesterday, in part 1, I showed you how to create a delegate access from one user to another. But what if you want an account like "sales" or "info" shown on your website that you want multiple people to reply to?

You wouldn't want to use a Distribution List because that means everyone montioring that DL would get a reply, all slightly different (hopefully slightly anyways!). You need a single mailbox in order to maintain the state so you don't spam your customer with too much response (ie over customer serve).

Basically, you would follow the steps in yesterday's post to create a user and create access, but you'd have to do one more step, you'd need to exclude that account ("sales" or "info") from the Password Policy.

Here's how:

  1. On the SBS server, open Server Management and expand Advanced Management, Group Policy Management, Forest, Domains and finally {yourdomain.local} .

  2. Select the Small Business Server Domain Password Policy.

  3. In the right-hand pane, on the Delegation tab, click Add.

  4. Type in the alias of the "sales" or "info" account and choose OK, then give this user Read access for now.

  5. Make sure the account is selected and choose Advanced at the bottom of the right-hand pane.

  6. In the ACL box that opens, choose Deny in the Full Control box (which checks all the boxes under it. Then choose OK.

Now you are preventing this account from reading the policy, so the policy will never apply to that specific user. Thus the "sales" & "info" accounts will never need to change their passwords. That of course makes it ultimately important that you choose very strong passwords for these accounts that cannot be dictionary hacked.

And now you are complete, you can have multiple users manage a single mailbox and that makes it easy for there to be only one reply to the customer when they have a simple sales question.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find a public folder a more sustainable solution than separate mailboxes. You can configure the folder to be the drop point for as many aliases as required and grant send on behalf of access to the users that need to send mail from the account.

To change the sneding address from a user's default address to the shared address requires the user to type the mailbox alias in the From field on the email message form.

Anonymous said...

The public folder seems like a good one at first glance. However it is a terrible hoopla setting up a Public Folder that you can send email replies from. You need to fiddle around with server scripts and possibly even forms.

By default everything goes into public folders as a Post not an email message.

I like the mailbox solution - in most cases this will do the job very well, and without spending hours, days even, setting up a mail enabled public folder.

Unknown said...

Hey Sean, I hope you are still reading the old stuff.

I would like your take on the singe mailbox for sales, now that a significant amount of time has past.

I have a similar setup here, and the exchange mailbox has grown to more than 4 GB, which is ofcourse a problem especially since the number of sales people have increased from 3 to 15.

Sean Daniel said...

I still am. Enjoy the single mailbox for sales.. if you've got the hard drive space, you might want to just increase the Exchange store size, keeping in mind not to go over the size of the disk (move the store otherwise) or making sure you don't make it too big for your backup window.

check out my post on how to do that.