How to create a Recipient Policy based on Company names?

One of the more frequently asked questions in an environment where you want to host more than 1 company’s email on a single Exchange server. Both companies have unique dns domains, let’s say CompanyA.com and CompanyB.com.

You typically end up locating thw users from the 2 (or more) companies in their own respective OUs.

You go to Recipient Policy in Exchange System Manager to create a recipient policy that generates the email addresses for CompanyA, but there’ s no option to be able to create a policy based on OUs! Unlike GPOs in Active Directory, Recipient Policy cannot be created base on OUs. Adding this feature would make lives of a gazillion Exchange admins easier, but the fact is you can’t.

So what are the options? You could create the policy based on attributes like location, department, company etc. In this case, we will go ahead and create the policy based on the company attribute.

This can be easily accomplished from the Recipient Policy GUI.

1. Go to the Recipient Policy container | right-click in the right pane where the default policy is listed | New | Recipient Policy.
2. From the New Policy dialog box, select the “E-mail addresses” checkbox to create a policy that generates email addresses. (The other option is Mailbox Manager settings) | click OK.
3. Enter a name in the General tab of the policy – let’s say “CompanyA Policy”
4. Click the Modify button – this presents the familiar ldap/ad search UI
5. In the Advanced tab, click the Field dropdown | select “User” | select the “company” attribute
6. From the “Condition” drop-down, select “Is (exactly)” condition
7. In the “Value” box type in the company name as it appears in your users’ Company field in AD Users & Computers | click Add to add the condition to the filter
8. [Optional] You can click on the “Find Now” button to see which users will be selected by that filter
9. Click on OK to add the filter to the policy. You may get an ESM warning that informs you about applying the policy | click OK
10. Go to the E-mail addresses tab | modify the default SMTP address to @companyA.com
11. ESM will prompt you to update recipient’s addresses. You can select Yes if you want to update immediately, or No if you are in a large domain where you want to schedule the update for later.

Wait for RUS to run. If set to run all the time, you can check the users’ properties to see if the intended recipients have the new email address.

Repeat the procedure for CompanyB.com domain.

Things To Remember:
1. You can modify the Default Policy to use it for CompanyA.com, else the Default Policy will still apply if its conditions are met, and you may see email addresses that are not required for a certain set of users.
2. When creating a new user, you will have to remember to always populate the user’s relevant attribute (company in this case) for the user to get the right email address.

Tags
Active Directory   Administration   GAL/Address Lists   SMTP