Re: Show-stopper Exchange problem


'Steve Friedl [MVP Wrote:
']"Cris Hanna [SBS-MVP]"
<crisnospamhanna@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote in message
news:8F313826-841E-402E-A5A9-B05BAEFFABA4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Steve,
are these separate mailboxes? or are these just email addresses
added to
the user's ADUC profile?

Each actual human user has his own personal email account with obvious
names
(steve@, dani@, etc.),
but the support addresses are Distribution Groups. Engineers are
members of,
and have Send-As permission to, these groups.

It did occur to us to make the support addresses actual mailboxes and
grant
full control to the engineers in question, this smells problematic in
terms
of people moving stuff out of the common mailbox (where all can see it)
and
into some personal PST. This is not insurmountable, and may have some
promise, but it certainly doesn't address the customized display name
issue.

Steve
--
Steve Friedl / UNIX Wizard / Microsoft Security MVP / www.unixwiz.net



--
Cris E. Hanna [SBS-MVP]
----------------------------------------
Please only reply in the Newsgroups and not to me directly.
-----------------------------------------
Posted via Windows Mail, on Vista Technical Edition, RC1
"Steve Friedl [MVP]" <steve@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:O1HNcAQ2GHA.4176@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello all,

We've just installed SBS2003 at a consultancy where I'm on staff,
and
we're having a very hard time solving a problem with Exchange that
was
handled very well with our Postfix server. It's SBS2003 with a
server in
a lights-out data center: 100% of our Outlook 2003 users do so via
RPC
over HTTPS to a full Exchange account.

We're a bunch of engineers supporting a small number of very large
customers, and there are multiple support aliases that we use: one
per
customer. Making up addresses to illustrate: contoso@xxxxxxxxxxx;
microsoft@xxxxxxxxxxx and so on, plus a generic support@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Customers at Contoso or Microsoft or whomever know to mail those
aliases,
and the proper engineers receive them. That part works really well.

When an engineer *sends* an email, he does so via setting the From:
address to the alias in question (out of the address book), so that
the
customer replies goes to the alias, and not just the person. This
required a bit of mucking with Send As permissions, but this part
works
fine too.

The problem: we want the display name to reflect the name of the
engineer:

"Contoso Support - Steve" <contoso@xxxxxxxxxxx>
or
"Contoso Support - Geoff" <contoso@xxxxxxxxxxx>
or
"Contoso Support - Russell" <contoso@xxxxxxxxxxx>

or the like.

With pretty much any regular old SMTP server, this is trivial: the
display name is controlled by the client, and the engineers just
configured multiple "Accounts" in Outlook to contain whatever they
wanted, but Exchange fills in the Display Name to be whatever is in
the
address book: this means that the recipient can't tell without
opening
the message which engineer sent it.

We've been doing this by using a separate SMTP server for outbound
mail,
but this gets really tedious and error prone to maintain (you have
to
change accounts all the time), and considering that some of our
customers
are competitors with each other, mistakes can be painful. These SMTP
accounts have to be associated with POP/IMAP boxes, even though we
never
use them for that - they're outgoing only.

So:

1) is there away to allow user-specified display name in Outlook
with
Exchange accounts?

2) we would love it if Outlook realized that since I'm replying to
contoso@xxxxxxxxxxx (the alias I'm on), that my reply would
automatically
be sent from that address rather than my own personal account. We
want
email to "just work" without all the shenanigans: nearly all of our
outgoing email is from a group alias, not a personal account.

This - especially #1 - is a deal-breaker for us (really), and we're
very
close to abandoning SBS to go back to Postfix/IMAP. I cannot believe
we're the only ones to have this issue.

We considered the tedious job of setting up a whole host of
custom-display-name entries in the address book (the above names),
but we
think that Exchange only allows *one* object to have a particular
email
address. So more than one entry with contoso@xxxxxxxxxxx simply will
not
work.

We'd be open to nearly anything, including (for instance) an Outlook
add-on if that would somehow handle this issues. We're spending more
time
screwing around with email than we are on engineering.

Anyone?

Steve
--
Steve Friedl / UNIX Wizard / Microsoft Security MVP /
www.unixwiz.net


No doubt that this is annoying, particularly for folks coming from a
traditional smtp/pop/imap setup. I could be mistaken but I'm pretty
sure the issue you're describing is only with Outlook running in full
Exchange mode setup? It sounds like you are already using an email
client running in smtp mode to set your display name on outbound email,
but I don't understand why you had to use a different server to do it?
Did the SBS server actually change your email client display name
setting if you sent an email to it via smtp? That's a surprise to me.
Regardless, you're comparing apples to oranges. When you say "with
pretty much any regular old smtp server this is trivial", you have to
understand that the same holds true for Exchange. It is a regular old
smtp server. If you want to use it as one. It is *also* much more if
you want to take advantage of those features via running in a MAPI/RPC
mode against it but it's not required. My point is that if you liked
the way a regular old smtp server worked then just use your Exchange
server in that way by setting up an email client to operate against it
using smtp.

Anyway, on to your question.

If you absolutely have to have those engineers running in mapi
mode-rpc/https then the options are pretty much limited to
customization I believe. There are other options instead of your 'Send
As' solution such as the ChooseFrom utility one of the other posters
mentioned but I don't believe that will effect the display name per
email that you are wanting, just the account...and you are already
accomplishing that via a 'Send As' solution.

The problem is just one of point of view. From the point of view of
Microsoft they *do* have 'user defined display names', it's just that
there is only *one* of those display names and you want multiple. When
running in Exchange mode you are basically saying "Store everything on
the server and just use my email client (outlook, owa, etc.) as an
interface to that information". So the display name is set at the
server level and not the client. You want to be able to define
information at the individual mail client level it sounds like so you
either have to write an app at the server level that can capture the
email, modify it, and send it out or use an email client in smtp mode
so that you can set the display name at the client level.

We wrote an Exchange scripted app some time ago that basically did what
you are trying to do, just in a more complex workflow as we used it as
our HelpDesk system for a while. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of
Exchange app development on SBS though but that's just my personal
opinion. With all of the wizards and tight integration I'm always
nervous about straying too far from the 'normal' configuration.

-matt


--
matt.ridings

Matt Ridings
MSR Consulting
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