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Sanity Check Please

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QCumber

Technical User
Apr 23, 2003
45
GB
Hi there,

I’d like to get some peer review type feedback on a project I’m planning.

I work for an engineering company with six sites in the UK and two each in France and Germany. In the UK we’re still running NT4 with Exchange 5.5 in a single domain. France and Germany are in a similar situation, with no connection between any of the three domains.

What we’re proposing is to create a single forest AD design with a placeholder root domain and separate domains for each of the three countries, something like this (rotated to the horizontal for ease of posting!)



-------- uk.engineering.com
Engineering.com |
-------- fr.engineering.com
|
-------- de.engineering.com


The idea being that we can easily add or remove country domains as the business dictates.

Now, as I understand it, we are only allowed a single Exchange organisation per forest, which will be called engineering.com, but we have several hundred users throughout the company with their own nationally based email addresses (ie fred@engineering.co.uk, kurt@engineering.de, etc). I am right in saying I can use custom recipient policies, applied to the individual country domains, to allow users to keep using their existing email addresses, as long as their primary SMTP address uses their national suffixes? Also, by giving users additional SMTP addresses with the engineering.com suffix, we can gradually transition them to the new corporate identity and eventually phase out the national addresses?

Assuming this works, are there any pitfalls I should look out for?

TIA,

Q.

 
That should work. You didn't mention your support structure, so I can't say whether splitting them among administrative groups would help.

I would caution you, though, about using a .com domain for your internal AD domain. Unless you're hosting your website, I'd using something like engineering.local

That has nothing to do with your SMTP domain, so your AD domain can be anything, really.

Pat Richard, MCSE MCSA:Messaging CNA MVP
Want to know how email works? Read for yourself -
 
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