I always use a script to create accounts using a combination of ADSI and
CDOEXM.  And I populate the msExchAccountControl property in the
process.  With one little script, you can even go back to using your old
CSV file format for creating things.

There's a perl sample at http://www.swinc.com/resource/scripts.htm and
there are WSH samples around in several places too (what used to be the
Compaq ActiveAnswers site for one, CDOLive also had one, the newsgroup
archives have several).

-----Original Message-----
From: Moore, David K [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 
Posted At: Thursday, September 19, 2002 3:17 PM
Posted To: Microsoft Exchange
Conversation: Test
Subject: It all started with a lie - Q313819



So, I write this to test the waters and see how others have managed this
issue -

For many years, going back to 4.0, we used CSV files to
create/manage/delete mailboxes within Exchange and this worked well.
Then comes along Exchange 2000, which with it's integration of Active
Directory and the requirement to use LDIFDE.  Ok, no problem I can learn
new tools and I learn the silly new LDIF import format and I make it do
what I want it to do - mailbox enable an existing AD account.  All is
well until a few weeks following the mailbox enabling of the accounts,
our users discover access to public folders (along with free/busy,
off-line address book, etc) can not be had.  A call to Microsoft
produces the answer that, the attribute of msExchUserAccountControl had
not been properly populated into AD.  Microsoft writes a script for us
that uses CDOEXM to re-set the permissions and while this does resolve
the problem for existing users it doesn't resolve the on-going problems.
So, Microsoft transferred me between a few groups (it's hard I guess to
know what is what when you've got half of your mail system managed by
another non-communicative group - Active Directory support) where I
landed with an LDIFDE support engineer.  This engineer then proceeded to
explain that it was not possible to create mailbox enabled AD accounts
with LDIFDE and pointed me to an article Q324353 [XADM: Users Cannot
Access Public Folders or Delegate Mailboxes on a Separate Server] which
states:  "If you want to use LDIFDE/ADSI to create users, Microsoft
recommends that you use LDIFDE/ADSI to create only the user accounts,
and then use Active Directory Users and Computers to create the
mailboxes." to which I replied that Microsoft does support it and the
answer can be found in Q313819 - [HOW TO:  Create Mailbox-Enabled
Account Using LDIFDE in Exchange 2000 Server] and after a bit of
discussion Microsoft decided that it really "sucks".  It all seems to
boil down to the fact that no one knows how the encoding of
msExchUserAccountControl is done (in PSS that is) and without the
ability to set that attribute at creation time, the RUS does not
properly setup the account and Microsoft has no intentions to support
this, even with the Q article on how to do it.

So, my question?  Simple - has anyone managed to use LDIFDE to create
and mailbox enable or just to mailbox enable an existing account in AD
and had it work properly, namely the use of public folders?

I don't know about others that have a long history with Exchange but, do
some of you feel that Exchange has made some real steps "backward" from
the functionality that Exchange 5.5 had?  And a word of warning to those
still on 5.5 - if it aint' broken, don't "fix" it.

Thanks,
david moore
Chevron Phillips Chemical


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