Creating mailboxes - Microsoft Exchange Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's log into our Exchange Admin Center in Exchange Server 2019, and we'll create some mailboxes. We see by default under recipients and mailboxes, there's already an administrator mailbox and that gets created by default when you install Exchange Server 2019, but we're going to add some additional ones, so let's click on the dropdown arrow and we have the option to create a user or linked mailbox. Let's click on the user mailbox, and we'll start by creating an alias. The name of our user's going to be Kate Jet, and what we want to do with the alias is we want to make the alias the same as the person's first and last name. If you put a space in the alias and click away, you see you'll get an error and we don't want that. An alias has to be space free. And this goes back to the POP3 and IMAP days of Exchange Server where the alias had to match the user name. Otherwise, you wouldn't get POP or IMAP to work properly. So even though we don't use POP and IMAP anymore for the most part, we still need to set up the alias because some of those features are still available if we turn them on. Let's go to new user and we'll put in Kate for the first name. We don't need initials, so we'll just put in jet for the last name. When we click on display name, it automatically fills in the full name. Now under organizational unit, this links to active directory and all the different OUs that are in active directory on our domain, which is called techpub.us. If we don't set up any particular OU to assign Kate to, she'll automatically get assigned to the users, and we'll go ahead and do that. Now we need a logon name. I'm just going to use Kate to keep it simple. You don't need to use upper or lower case. It will work either way. Passwords, however, are case sensitive, so we'll put in a password that's compliant, which requires at least seven characters and one uppercase and lowercase. Also by default, it does require a number as well. You can certainly change that in group policy, but that is the default with active directory. If everybody gets the same password when you create their accounts for simplicity, then you'll want to check the box that says require password change on next log on. Otherwise, everyone's going to know each other's passwords. In our case, we're not doing that, so we'll click on more options. And we've got the option for the mailbox database. Now if you only have one mailbox database, this doesn't matter, but if you have multiple ones like we have, then it does matter, so we'll choose the one in exchange one but you can choose any mailbox database that you've created. If we wanted to create an on-premise archive mailbox for this user, we can do that, as well. Now this first requires that we set up a rule that says when email is going to be archived. And you can set that up to say after six months or two years or whatever it is you'd like, your email that's in your mailbox will automatically get moved to the archive. This is really helpful because it keeps mailboxes from getting so large that they take forever to open or do any kinds of searches. They go into a separate file in your Exchange Server, and you can still access that, but under a separate section in Outlook. Since we haven't set up our archive rules, I'll just go ahead and uncheck that one. And under address book policy, we don't have a policy set up for that yet either. However, what address book policies do is it allows us to download an offline copy of the address book. So that way, when we're connected remotely, we don't have to connect to the server to get a list of names in order to send an email to a user. We still need to connect to the server to send the email, but now we can resolve the names much more quickly. Once that's done, we'll click save, and now we have Kate Jet as a user under the mailbox type in our server. Let's add another user mailbox, but we're going to do things a little differently. I'm going to put in our alias as Josh Daring. Josh does not yet have an account, so I'll put in Josh's name, and I'll scroll down. I'm going to choose a different OU. We'll say Josh is in HR and we'll use the logon name and the password, once again. And then we'll go down to where it says more options, and this time, we'll choose the other mailbox database. And then we'll click save. By default under the email address, we see that Kate and Josh both have their default email addresses set to their first name and last name. We can certainly add additional ones or make changes to that, if we need to. For our last user, I'm going to go to our domain controller and open up active directory users and computers. I'm going to pre-create the username and then we're going to create a new mailbox using an existing user instead of a new user. We have our domain, we'll expand, and under users, right click, choose new user. I've pre-filled everything in for Tom Carney. Click next. We'll say that the user does not need to change the password and we'll put in our password. As long as I don't click the box that says password never expires, whatever the current password policy is, that will be when Tom's password expires and that will also work with the other users, as well. So Tom has now been created. Let's switch back to our Exchange server. We're in our Exchange server. Let's choose to create another user mailbox and we'll put Tom Carney as far as the alias goes, and now I will choose an existing user instead of creating a new one, and there's Tom. And you can see we don't really need to fill out anything else. We can just click save and now we're done. I've also created a fourth user named Linda and now we have four users ready to go with our Exchange server, where we can do some testing, open up Outlook and Outlook web app. We'll do all that and more in upcoming videos.