Help us learn how you use Exchange management tools to manage your server and organization objects!

The form seems broken when submitted.

@ Paul: thank you for letting us know; I have temporarily removed the survey link and have escalated the problem internally.

And you don't want to ask how we manage users, groups and DLs because you do not want to hear that we miss the ADUC? Think about, to get users managed in environment where you have Lync and Exchange, you need three built-in tools to do the job.

1. To manage AD objects you need ADUC

2. To manage Exchange attributes, you need Exchange tools

3. To manage Lync attributes (even they are not so much in AD anymore) you need Lync's tools.

Do you have any good explanation why we are here with three different tools? Isn't silly??

We have now fixed the survey at the above link; sorry for the inconvenience, please take the time if you want to help us with this! :)

"The answer of the question is too long."

You want to hear us or not ?  ;-)

@Petri X

I think it makes a lot of sense to use three different tools to manage those things. In a large environment the people managing AD, Exchange, and Lync are three seperate entities. Why would you give Exchange administrators access to edit AD objects like security groups or non-Exchange objects or properties of a user when they don't need to touch that stuff? Why would Lync administrators care about Remote Login details or Group Policies?

Exchange has the ability, with RBAC roles, to give better flexibility to organizations to give administrators the ability to do their job without opening up ACLs in AD to allow them to do things you don't really want them to do. Instead of giving a junior administrator full-permissions with ACLs to move a mailbox, now you can give them the RBAC permissions for the Move-Mailbox cmdlet, without giving them full ACL rights to all the mailboxes in an organization.

I can't imagine a single tool available that can deal with Exchange's RBAC permissions and AD's ACLs and not being a complete mess.

magicp

Good point, but why should we forgot the normal helpdesk and user administrators in the large organizations or the IT all together in a smaller organizations. I'm not sure why I have to ask them to use:

1. ADUC for creating user object into AD by ADUC (e.g. roaming profile settings can set on there only, and password reset)

2. Then they have to enable mailbox by the Exchange tool

3. And last, use the Lync tools for enabling the Lync

I see that we are looking for too close how the admins are working and are they happy, but there are others as well..

@Petri X: The future is supposed to be powershell. Admins shouldn't be going into various GUI consoles to create users etc if they use powershell. If you had a request to create 10+ new user accounts and your using GUI tools then you need to review your processes.

Alternatively theres tools like FIM but I don't see many companies using that at the momment.

Enable/Disable the Outlook Anywhere feature per user.

Now you can only enable it or disable it for All Users.

Only in the Powershell it's possible to disable it on User accounts.

Creating out-of-box Reports for Management in the GUI?

Now it's only possible to create reports from Powershell query's and to export them to CSV.

But maybe it's possible to have some "most used reports" in the GUI.

Like : Mailbox sizes, mobile phone usage/models, how many mails sent/received from users, mailbox quota's, etc