Extending ActiveRoles Server Management to Exchange Resource ForestsActiveRoles Exchange Resource Forest Manager
Many medium- and large-size organizations find themselves in an environment that requires a multi-forest Active Directory deployment to cope with organizational structure issues (e.g., autonomous business units and decentralized IT departments), business policy or legal and regulatory requirements. Although it offers the highest level of security isolation and separation of administrative responsibility, it also introduces the need for inter-forest management; among the most important is the Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 messaging system. With multiple forests, one of the options for integrating Exchange with Active Directory is the resource forest model.
While the Exchange Resource Forest model does separate Exchange Infrastructure management from the various user account forests, it also requires complex directory provisioning and synchronization between forests. Each time an administrator creates a user account in an account forest, a disabled shadow account with a mailbox must be created in the Exchange forest and appropriate security permissions assigned. The account properties must also be synchronized between the account forest and the Exchange forest so that the Global Address List (GAL) is consistent. These processes cannot be automated using native Active Directory mechanisms and require significant amounts of administrative time to keep up with.
ActiveRoles Server offers Exchange Resource Forest Manager which exploits the multi-forest management capability of ActiveRoles Server to synchronize and provision accounts between a User Account Forest and the Exchange Resource Forest. Additionally, Exchange properties are projected from the Resource Forest onto the property pages of users in the User Forest for single point user account management. This creates the following benefits associated with the Exchange Resource Forest model:
- Reduce costs
- Automate the provisioning lifecycle
- Automate the synchronization processes
-
-
-
Next Steps
-
Additional Resources
-
Related Solutions
|