Sharing Calendars and Contacts on SBS 2003

[dball63]

Our office wants to start using exchange to share calendars and contacts on our SBS 2003 server. Really what they want is one central calendar for scheduling as well as a central contacts share. Exchange is currently setup and users are using their exchange mailboxes to manage their personal calendars and contacts only at this point.
Currently mail is outsourced and pulled to each local machine pst files. No mail is being hosted on the exchange server today for security concerns and less management. Not sure this is the right way to do it but its been working with no issues? I suppose we could host our own mail with exchange but I'm concerned about the risks and the time that may be involved managing those risks?

With that in mind, what do you suggest the best way to make the office more productive? I'm guessing that the shares should go into a public folder somehow? I'm not 100% familiar with public folders. Or do I setup a resource account maybe? Thats what I have done in the past with GroupWise mail systems.

Other concerns are that with the external mail addresses will conflict with internal domain name addresses when users are sending mail and appoinments to each other. If I rememeber correctly, there maybe a way to edit the email addresses in the GAL to be sure it points email to the hosted acccounts. Am I anywhere near close on this? Please help.

David

 

[58sniper]

THE RISKS? It's FAR FAR FAR more insecure siting in .pst files.

[google]exchange shared calendar[/google]
[google]exchange shared contacts[/google]

Get rid of those hosted accounts and make your environment more secure, and use far less bandwidth.

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

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[dball63]

It's FAR FAR FAR more insecure siting in .pst files
Can you explain

David

 

[58sniper]

Where are those .pst files? Probably on the workstations, since putting them on a server is not only a problem, but it's unsupported.

If they are on the workstation, they can't be scanned for viruses. They can't be backed up. The mail now takes more space in the .pst files (for several reasons). There is no ability to restore them (since they likely aren't backed up. There are known limits as to how big those files can be.

[google]why .pst are bad[/google]

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

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

 

[dball63]

Thats true, the pst files are on the workstations and are not backed up. That is a risk. When you said risk earlier in your post, I thought you meant security risk. Which I am most concerned with at this point.
I am aware that these local pst files could be lost in the event of failure. I'm concerned but not sure that risk outweights the risk of keeping that mail on the server that at this time has not protection. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking that way?
Keep in mind this office is light mail users. They would however benefit from exchange shared calendars and contacts. So I would at least tackle that first. Later I can worry about that mail and mail hosting because that may require some additional software/services and maybe even hardware.

David