Adding many external contacts to Exchange

[smc2005]

Hi folks,

I work as network admin at a school and we are exploring methods of sending
out information to parents that doesn't involve chopping down rain forests. I
know that external contacts can be added to AD and will be picked up in
Exchange address lists. What we need to do is:

1. Add 1000+ contacts
2. These contacts to go into the relevant OU for that year group (for
example, all year 3 parents go into a year 3 folder) for easy management
3. A Distribution List to be created for each year group
4. Only certain people to be able to see and send to the Distribution Lists
5. Whan a parent recieves an email, they shouldn't be able to see the email
addresses of other parents (I know that within Outlook you can expand a DL
and see it's members)

I've got a feeling that Exchange might not be the tool to do this with but I
need to check what we can do with the tools we have. I would very much
appreciate any help that anyone can give me.

Thanks!

Steve.

[Kirrin Jones]

There are third party tools that I'm sure that can do what you want, but
I always try to make what I have do what I want before looking outside,
so...

1. You will need to create what is called a Contact in AD. Doing that
1000+ times might be the deterrent but not sure if you can do it in
Excel and import.

2. You will of course create your required OU and add the contacts
according.

3. Once an DL is in the AD, then there is no way to prevent some persons
from seeing it. Its either visible or not. You can however restrict who
can send to that DL via the Exchange General tab of the Properties of
that DL.

4. As for seeing the members of the group, you can either place the
group in the BCC field, which would make sure that they not even see the
name of the DL or you can hide the members of the group so that it
cannot be expanded.

Hope that I have at least indicated to you that it can be done, it just
needs some time (especially) to enter the e-mail addresses.

Good luck.

[smc2005]

Hi Kirrin. Many thanks for this, I agree it might be better to use third
party tools but my boss wanted me to check. I appreciate the time you took to
reply which makes using these newsgroups a pleasure :)

Best wishes,
Steve.

[ainsof220]

Hi Kirrin,

I'm attempting to do something similar on a newly installed Exchange 2007
system and am having the following problems. (I am totally new to exchange,
please help if you can.)

1. I have delegated administration of a DL to a given user, but really
don't feel comfortable having her add / remove contacts through AD or the
Exchange Mgmt Console. What else can be used, or how can I totally restrict
her activites to only add / remove if she has to use eaither of the above
tools?

2. Also regarding DLs: A given distribution list made up of employees and
outside contacts; only employees are allowed to post / reply to emails sent
out across the listserv. management wants to change this so that external
contacts can also reply / post to the list. How do I do this?

Thank you for any help you may have for me,

James