1. Understanding the Global Address List
Address lists are something that are created automatically when you install Exchange, and with Exchange Online, you’ve got a global address list as well. The global address list can be found in the different versions of Outlook, whether it be Outlook Online or Outlook on the Web, also known as the Outlook Web app or formally known as the Outlook Web app, I should say.
What exactly is the lady? The Global Address List is going to be a repository where all of your different recipients can be listed in Microsoft Exchange. This is a pretty important capability if you think about it because your users have to be able to locate the people they want to email, and they may not know the person’s email address off the top of their heads or whatever. So they need to be able to pull up this list and quickly and easily find the person to whom they want to send an email. Okay, this is also a great way for people to locate contact information for other people and be able to get a hold of somebody depending on which piece of contact information they need.
So the girl is going to play a role in that. And of course, with on-premises Exchange, we have Active Directory domain services, and inside of Active Directory, we have this thing called the global catalog. And the global catalogue is something that actually replicates across your forest, and your GAL will be associated with that and replicate within your organization. Now, for the most part, most everybody in the Exchange world usually just has one global address list that they use, and your users can really only see one global address list for the most part. However, there are situations where you may need to create multiple Galstos to be associated with certain individuals. Imagine a situation where you have two different companies that are part of the same organization, and you have a CEO or some upper management or whatever that is over both companies, and these particular people, the CEO or whoever, need to be able to see a dress list from both sides. So it is possible to do that. You can use address policies, address book policies, and all that to manage some of this stuff, but there is a little trickiness to setting that up. There are some graphic things you can do there.
There are also some PowerShell things you can do there, but for the most part, your users are going to have access to one gal that they’re going to use to see everything that’s going on. Some other facts about your global address Okay, so the global address list itself is going to be managed through EMS. Now there’s a little confusion there because people will find that in the Exchange Admin Center you can create custom address lists, but we’re talking about the global address list here. So the Exchange management shell is where you’re going to manage that to create, modify, remove, or even update your global address list settings. This is all going to be done through Exchange Management Shell. Now the users that you’re dealing with in your environment: if you ever do decide to create multiple groups and associate those with people, you do have to give them a unique name. Every global address list must have a unique name, but users in Outlook are not going to actually see what the name of the global address list is. It’s just going to show up as the default global address list. Okay? Now again, you can create a custom address list that defines certain people. For example, I can create a custom address list called “Sales” and have the “Sales Department” associated with it. I can make another one called Marketing with a marketing department, and another called Finance with a finance department. So you can do that, but we’re talking about the girl. T
he girl does not change her name depending on who is looking at it. Everybody’s going to see it as the default global address list. Okay? Users do have to have permissions to view a gallery. So if you were to create a custom group and assign it to people, you do have to have permissions. You’re going to do this using something called ABPS. These are known as address book policies, and from there, you would associate the address book policy with the people that you want to be able to see it. And the idea is that if a user is eligible to see multiple goals, then the larger one is essentially the one they’re going to be associated with, depending on that address book policy. And one of the last things I want to look at is your default address list that you have.So when you open up Outlook, you’re going to see the default address list that you have. Here is your girl. Your first one is the default global address list, and then there are some prebuilt, what they call “precanned” address lists that are part of your environment.
So you have all rooms; it’s going to show your room-based mailboxes, all users, and all distribution lists. So you’ll see specifically just your distribution list involved; there you’ll see all contacts, all right; you’ll see all groups in general; and then you’ve also got what’s called the “offline global address list,” which is a global address list that is available to you even if you don’t have a network connection. All right, and we’re actually going to be talking about offline address books and all that that coming up.And then the last thing you’ve got there is the public folder. So you can see all your public folders and list them out as well. So this is your default address list, and hopefully it gives you a good understanding of what the global address list is, and we’ll look at customising and managing some of that in the coming sections.
2. Managing the Global Address List
We’re going to start by creating a new email. We’ll take a look at our global address list and just the different address lists that are already built right here into my exchange environment. Okay, so we’re going to click to create a new email here, and then we’re going to click to locate some contacts, and you’ll get a little pop-up screen here. You can now see the global address list. Okay, so I can drop this little list down here and see my various addresses.
Let’s zoom in on that. Take a deeper look here—a closer look, I should say. Okay, so you have your contacts, the global address list, and the address list, which includes all of your contacts, the distribution list, all of your groups, all of your rooms, and all of your users. And this is your offline global address list, which gets into the concept of the OAB, the offline address book. And then, of course, here are your public folders. Okay, so you can select these, and it kind of breaks it down into the different options that are available. I just clicked on “all distribution lists.” You can see I have the research group here: research at Exam Labpractice.com.You can see all groups. There are rooms there; conference room 1 is one of them. If you had any public folders, which I don’t have at the moment, they would all be listed. Okay, so as you can see, using Outlook to display your global address is pretty straightforward. Let’s jump now into the Exchange Administrative Center and have a look at our address list options here.
So I’m going to pull up the Administrative Center, and we’re going to go straight over to the Organization option here and then Address List. Okay, so here are our different address lists that we have. You’ll notice the gal is located there. All right, the first thing I’m going to do is click to create an address list. So I just want to look at the options with you on this. So as I click the plus sign here to add an address list, it asks me what I want to call it. I’m going to call it marketing. We’re going to create an address list that’s going to focus just on the marketing department. So let’s zoom in on this. So, just looking at our options First off, you can specify an address list path simply by clicking Browse. And if I wanted to add it as a child to another address list, I could. So that’s the idea there. Then I can say what types of recipients to include right here. I’ve got all the recipients. Of course, I could mail users with external email addresses, resource mailboxes, only mail contacts with external email addresses, or just mail enabled groups.
I’m going to choose all recipients, but we’re going to narrow this down by adding a rule; the rule involves conditions that you want this to meet for it to apply. So we make our choice here. I’ve got these different attributes I can go with, okay? So I could do a recipient container if I wanted to. And in this case, it will point to something like an organisational unit in Active Directory. But I don’t want to do that because I’m going to specify the department. So we’ll choose a department, a department attribute, and a marketing setting. So any user whose department attribute is set to marketing is going to fall into this category. Okay, so you’ve added that. I forgot to click the plus sign. That kind of helps if you do that. Click the plus sign to actually add it. And then at that point, one thing that’s cool that I can do is click to preview, and it’ll show me who’s going to be a member of this. Now we just have a couple of users that I think I’ve actually added to that marketing attribute. So these two users are here. So if you were to actually go into those user accounts, you would see that their department attributes are set to marketing.
So right now, this would be the extent of our marketing. Department is not very big in this case, but I’m just showing an example of that. So at that point, I can officially click “Save,” and it’s now going to save that for me in exchange. And I’ve got myself an address list. Okay, so let’s jump now into the Exchange Management Shell and see how we can look at these address lists and also look at how we can interact with our address book policies. So, pulling up the Exchange Management Shell here, the first thing I want to do is I just want to see what my address book policies are, and if I type Get address book policy and hit enter, I don’t have any; I have no address book policies at the moment. Well, let’s look at our address list. So we’ll type “Get address list” and hit enter. And you can see that I do have some addresses here. Okay. And I want to see them, so here are the different address lists I have, and there’s the marketing one I just created. Let’s view our girl; we’ll see what she looks like.
So I’m going to type “get global address list,” and that’s the name of our global address list. And then we also need to know the name of the offline address list. You’ll see why here in a second. But I’m going to type “get offline address book,” and there is our offline address book. Okay. So now I’d like to make an address book policy. And this will allow me to customise this mailbox for my users, allowing me to customise it and apply it to their mailboxes if desired. So, I’m going to create a new address book policy and give it a name. I’m just going to call it Test ABP. just for the fun of it, all right? And then I’m going to specify the address list that I want to add. So then all I have to do is look at the names here on my list that I want to add. Okay? So we’ll add, and remember to put a slash through all contacts. So I’ll enter my contacts and then a comma. I’m going to say, “How about all users?” All users and then a comma And we’re going to add the marketing one as well. So we’ll say marketing overlooked the backslash.
All right? And then we’re going to do the room list as well. You must now enter room list to complete the room list. Okay? So all rooms All rooms. Okay. And then the gal and the offline address book will be separate parameters as well. So I’m going to say global address list, type the name of that default, and put that backslash, default, in global address list. Okay. And then the offline address book is going to be the default offline address book. And I believe we have it all. Hopefully, we didn’t typo anything here. I’m going to hit Enter, and it’s going to create this policy for me. Test ABP. Now, if I wanted to, I could apply this policy to a bunch of users using EMS here, or I can jump back into the graphical tool and apply it that way. So I want to show you how this is going to play out for us. So we’ll jump back into the Exchange Administrative Center.
We’re going to go to the recipients. Let’s pick a user like Alex Johnson. We’ll double-click on him, which will let us edit him. And then once this pops up, we’re going to go to Mailbox Features, and this is where we can select the address book policy that we just created. So that’s going to apply to him, and that’s going to apply those different settings and those different address books that we just configured. Okay? So all in all, though, hopefully you’ll find that working with your girlfriend and looking at these different settings and applying the policies is not too bad or difficult. As always, I definitely encourage you to check out the knowledge-based article on the policy commands page and look at some of your options. But hopefully, now that you’ve seen it demonstrated, you’ll find it’s not as difficult as you think. And it can be very helpful when you need to control exactly which address lists users are going to be able to access.
3. Understanding the Offline Address Book (OAB)
So what exactly is in your offline address book? You can tell by the name that it has something to do with what they’re discussing here. This is going to be a local copy of a list of addresses that’s basically put together in a collection known as your OAB. Your offline address book essentially allows your users to pull up an address list or group of addresses through their offline address book even when they are not connected to the Internet.
This is used and basically configured through what’s called the “Cached Exchange Mode.” Okay, so these OABs are an option that you’ll have with Outlook so that when you’re disconnected from Exchange, it’ll pull up this offline address book and you’ll be able to click on the different users you want to email. Even if you don’t have a network connection, you can draught emails, prepare to send them, have them sent, and when you do have a network connection, it will send those emails for you. This allows people to, for example, if they’re on an aero plane and don’t have a WiFi connection or whatever internet connection they need to get a lot of work done while on the plane, they can open Outlook.
They’ve got their offline address book; they can type up emails that they want to different people, and then when they get connected again, it’ll fire off those emails. And that’s sort of the logic here. Okay, so you can configure which address lists you want to be included in people’s OAB. If you want, you can pick and choose what you want. Of course, there is going to be a default one that it creates, but if you want to customise it a little bit, you can talk about some facts about the offline address book. First off, you get one right out of the gate by default. The default offline address book (OAB) is what it’s called. And this is going to be used to tie everybody’s mailboxes together. kind of like the global address book is in Exchange. So a lot of your global address list is basically going to be integrated with your OAB. Now, this has been improved over the years. We previously used Microsoft Exchange 2010; when we upgraded to Exchange 2013, they essentially added some new features. One of the things they did was improve the mailbox assistant. This was previously known as the Microsoft Exchange System Attendance Service.
The Microsoft System Attendance service does not manage this. So it’s now the mailbox assistant, and this is an actual service that’s going to go through and generate your OABs and allow those to be provided and issued out to your devices. And there can be maintenance and scheduling that happen with all of that. They also mention it here with OAB. The generation will take place with the arbitration mailbox. Arbitration mailboxes are a collection of different arbitration mailboxes in exchange that perform background services related to your mailboxes and mailbox databases. And the cool thing is that if you have a database availability group, all of this will be prevented from happening in any kind of failover or fault tolerance situation where there is a single point of failure. So your OABs are generated, your OABs are distributed out to your mailbox, which serves mailbox databases, and your clients get those, cache them, and are able to access the OAB. Okay? So that’s the idea of OAB, a pretty straightforward concept, and there are a few things you can do to customise your OAB.
4. Working with the Offline Address Books (OABs)
Exchange Administrative Center Okay, we’re going to click on servers, and then I want to look at virtual directories over here. So if we look at virtual directories, we’ll notice we have the offline addressbook virtual directory right here. So we’re just going to double-click on that. And this is how we can tell where our offline address book is coming from at this location here.So we wanted to configure our internal URL and external URL for that.
For a virtual directory, we could internally store this as how the offline address book would be received. Mail at examlabpractice.com would be the external address. This is the polling interval for getting their offline address book in minutes, as you can see. Okay, so now that we’ve done that, I want to jump over to our database. We’ll click on the database. We can edit and set that by clicking on one of our databases, such as marketing here. If we come down here and take a look at our client settings, we have an offline address book. The issue is that we only have our default one right now. So if I wanted to create an offline address book just for marketing people, I was going to use PowerShell to do that. Now this is also going to tie into our dress list. As a result, you must ensure that all of your address lists are completed. You’re going to create a customised offline address book just for marketing here. Okay, so I’m going to jump now into the Exchange Management Shell, and we’re going to look at running some commands here.
So the first command I want to run is just going to show me my offline address book, which I’ve got right now. So get your address book ready. Sorry, I meant offline address book rather than address book policy. And then that would show me what I’ve got. And as you can see, I just have one offline address book, and that’s the default one, which everybody is using by default. So what I want to do now is start over. So I’m going to say “new Dash.” Oh, one last thing. Let’s get our address list as well. So if we look at our address list, we can view the address lists that are available. I always like to have that displayed on the screen when I am about to create my new offline address book. So I’m going to say “new offline address book name.” We’re going to call this marketing OAB, and then we’ll specify the address list we want associated with it. So, in my case, I’m just going to do the marketing one. We’re just going to keep it simple.
But if we wanted to associate other address lists with this marketing OAB, we could. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and hit enter. And that should create that offline address book, which, as you can see, it did. Now if I type “get offline address book,” it should display. And as you can see, it does. If you want to see all this information, you can also just do “Get Offline Address Book” and then “Format as a List” if you want, and that’s going to show all the information for you. Okay. And if you’d rather just see specific information, like the schedule, how about looking at the schedule?I could type “Get Offline Addressbook” and type that over to formatlist. And then, how about we look at the name? comma and the schedule. So show me the name of the schedule. So there’s your name, and there’s your schedule for the address list currently. Okay. And the other thing is, if we want to force it to get updated now, we could, but let’s say maybe before we want it to update, let’s associate it with our database.
So we’re going to jump back over to the EAC. All right, let’s pull that back up here. All right. And from there, we’ll go over here to the servers. We’ll look at our database. Let’s go to marketing. All right. And we’re going to set this to client settings browse, and we’ll go ahead and attach it to the marketing OAB. Instead of the default, we’re going to save that, which is now officially saved. And now the last thing we want to do is just go ahead and update our list here. Okay. So there’s a handy command you can use. You can type. Take a look at your offline address book. You can specify the name, which is “marketing OAB,” and then you can pipe that to update the offline address book. That will immediately update the offline address book. Okay, so it’ll all be set up, and now our users that are tied to our marketing database will be using the offline address book we just created. Let me reformat the schedule here.
It shows the schedule again on the screen, but it’s now updated officially for me. All right? And if you want to see when it was last updated, type this command right here to get offline Address Book. And then we’ll say marketing OAB, and then we’ll pipe that to Formatlist. I could have really saved myself a little time just by hitting up Arrow, but oh well. And then let’s do names. Comma. And then? How about the last touch? That was one of the properties that you could have looked at. I’ll put Star there too. Okay. And as you can see, it shows that it has officially been updated as of right now. Okay, but all in all, as you can see, when working with offline address books, the key there is that you have to determine which address lists you want to be part of your OAB. You create the OAB point, which is that address list, and then you associate it with the mailbox database to which you want your recipients to be linked and to which you want this to apply. Okay, so hopefully that helps you wrap your brain around OAB.
5. Configuring Organizational Sharing
What exactly is this about? So organisational sharing is a feature that we can implement in our environment that allows us to set and share calendar information and free-flow information with other organizations. One really cool feature of this is that we can share organisational information, a calendar, free busy information, and availability information not only with our own company or organization, but also with others. The other thing is that we have a lot of leeway because we can do this with other on-premises Exchange organisations as well as other Microsoft 365 or Office 365 organizations. So we can kind of mix and match. We can have a Microsoft 365 environment shared with another Microsoft 365 or Exchange on-premises; we can mix and match any way we want. Okay, so there are going to be some set-ups you have to do. There’s something called federation that you have to allow in order to make that happen with your on-premises Exchange.
This relationship is actually called “Federation.” Okay? And when you work with clouds, the great thing about doing it through the cloud is that the federation is already available to you through your Microsoft 365 services. With Exchange Online, it is something you have to turn on. So the good news is, any way you look at it, they’ve actually made it pretty easy, and you can have things turned on within just a few minutes and get the sucker up and running. Okay. Now the other thing is that this is a one-to-one relationship. Now what does that mean? Well, this isn’t something I’m going to basically say; I’m just going to turn it on and say, “Well, this is for all organizations.” Now I actually have to have this relationship with the specific organization. So if there are five organisations that I’m doing organisational sharing with, then I’ve got to have this relationship with each one. It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation.
Okay, so the other thing is that when you do this organisational sharing, you’re going to be setting up your side of things, and the other organisation would have to set up their side of things. They’re going to control exactly what’s going to be shared on their end. Okay, I think that’s kind of obvious if you think about it. I’m not going to set up my side and then tie it to you, and it will automatically set up your side. Right, you would have to set it up. If I’m an organization and you’re an organization, we’d both have to mutually set up this relationship. Okay. Now there are three levels of access that are going to be used in an organizational relationship. You have no access, which simply means, “Hey, we’re not supporting it at all.” I could configure it, and then later down the road I could switch it to no access if I wanted to. Okay, I have availability, but only during my downtime. It will only give me time, after which I will have free access to Busy, including time subject and location. So those are your main three options that you’re going to be able to configure when you do this.
Now, through Exchange, you can go into the Exchange Admin Center to configure this pretty easily. You’ll see that there’s an organisation option there on the left, and then you can click on Sharing up top. And I will be showing this to you as well. But I’d like to give you a little bit of a visualisation here. Then, another option is to use PowerShell to accomplish this. Okay, so there are two commands I want to point out with PowerShell that you could use: you have the GetFederation information and you specify the domain name. I would type Get Federation Information, Domain Name contoso.com if I were pointing to a company called Contoso, in this case Contoso.com. If I was going to do this to Examlabpractice.com, then I would get a federation domain name. Get examlabpractice.com. The bottom one is actually building the relationship.
Now remember, you can do this graphically, but this is how you would do it using PowerShell. So ExamLabPractice.com is the new organisational relationship name. This allows me to associate multiple domain names in one line here in North America. So as I write this PowerShell command, you’ll notice that I could have multiple domain names listed out there that I want to set this up with. However, the relationship is ultimately built on these domain names, and from there I can set my access, as shown by the Dashfree busy access enabled and set to true, and the Free busy access level, which has limited details you can control. So that’s a pretty easy little PowerShell command to run there. And as always, I encourage you to look up the Knowledge Base articles too, because there are some more switches and parameters you could look at.
But setting up the organisational relationship is pretty straightforward, and we’re also going to be taking a look at how we would do it. Let’s jump right in and look at the organisational sharing from Exchange Online. So I’m right here on adminmicrosoft.com, also known as Portal Microsoft.com.I’m going to click “Show All,” and we’re going to go into Exchange. Okay, so we’re pulling up Exchange Admin Center for Exchange Online, and once we get in here, we’re going to be looking on the left, and we’re going to click on the organisational blade here. So here is the organization, and we’re going to go ahead and click on that, and you’ll see we have sharing right here. And once this pops up, you’ll notice that we have a couple of things. So here’s where you actually configure organisational sharing, all right, but just as a sidenote, there’s also something called individual sharing. Individual sharing is a sharing policy that allows your users to share information with other organizations.
But in this case, I want to look more closely at this since that’s the topic we’re going over. As you can see, it says “enable,” “free,” “busy,” and other calendar information sharing between Federated Exchange organizations. So I’m going to go ahead and click the plus sign here. And then at that point, I would specify the name of the organisation that I was doing this with. So if I were doing this with a company called Acme Corporation, I would say Acme Corp. And then I would specify their domain name, Acmecorp.com. All right. And you could now specify other domains from there; I would need to say “enable calendar free busy information.” This is where you configure your access. Right. So the options here are pretty straightforward. The first is a calendar-free, busy information with only time. Then you’ve got time, subject, and location, plus everyone in the organisation if I want to share a calendar-free visit with everyone or a specific group. So if I wanted to, I could click Browse on that and specify a specific group that I wanted to make this available to. Right, all right. So again, the options are pretty straightforward.
At that point, you would click “Save.” The other organisation has to be accessible as well, and you would be able to do this. Now it’s just a matter of clicking “Save.” Now, let’s go over to the Exchangeon premise and compare the two. So here we are with our on-premise Exchange server, NYC Ex One. We were just looking at Exchange online, but the results were the same. If I just click over here on the organisation blade here, I can go enable this. Now you’re going to notice it says a federation trust isn’t enabled. So, as I was saying earlier, you have to make sure that when you’re dealing with Exchange on premise, you enable this federation. So I don’t have any options right now for sharing until I enable this federation. And from there, I can set up the same type of information using Exchange on Prem. So you have to enable it first, and then you can set it up. There’s also the capability of doing this with the help of the EMS, the Exchange Management Shell, as well. Overall, I believe Microsoft has made setting up organisational sharing fairly simple and straightforward. easy to configure through the graphical tool as well as through the PowerShell commands.
6. Managing Add-ins
Okay, we’ll go ahead and click the Organizationblade here, followed by Add Ins. Let me just kind of zoom in on that for you. As you can see, we already have some add-ins that come with Exchange right out of the box. As you click on each of these, you can also read the description of them, and you can also set permissions on them. Here, you select the little edit icon.
You’ll notice that you get a little pop-up, and you can adjust what you want to allow here. So, for example, I simply clicked on being Maps. It says to make this add-on available to users in your organization. You can specify optional, enable by default, disable by default, mandatory, always enable, and cannot be disabled by the user. Those are pretty self-explanatory permissions, as you can see here. Enable, disable, or make it mandatory. I can add more of these addons by dragging this down here. I can add some from the store, the Office Store, which I’ll be jumping into in a second, showing you that you can add from a URL, which means you’ve got an add-in that’s shared out through a website. And then you could also do it via a file.
There are some special formats—XML-based formats—that you have to point to for that. However, that is where you would enter your email in the Exchange on-premise server. Let’s now jump into Exchange Online and take a look there. You’re in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, which is admin dot Microsoft.com or poll dot Microsoft.com. You can drop the show all the way down here. Then you can go to Settings and look for an option called “add-ins.” Now, I’d like to point out that you’ve essentially been able to go into Exchange Online, go to Organization, and add in there. But that method has sort of been deprecated. Now they’re wanting you to use the Microsoft 365 Admin Center to do it. And the big thing here with add-ins in your Microsoft 365 is that this is not just for Exchange or just for Outlook actually.You can have add-ons for other products, okay, if you want.
Right now I’m looking at just add-ins for Outlook because we are obviously doing an Exchange course here. But you can have add-ins for Word, Excel, and all that. So to deploy add-ins, all you have to do is click “Deploy Add-in” here, all right. And then at that point, it gives you some information about doing deployments of add-ins and using the Office Store. I’m going to click Next, and I can say choose from the store, or I could say upload a custom app. So I’m going to go choose from the store, and then it’s going to show me all the products. So here you go. Excel is a PowerPoint word. I’m going to click Outlook. And here are all the things that I can make available through Outlook. I’m going to choose to add Salesforce, and then I’m going to hit Continue. And then at that point, I can assign everyone. I can assign to specific groups. I can assign just one deployment method. You have it fixed. It says the add-in will be automatically deployed to the assigned users, and they will not be able to remove it from the ribbon.
You can make it available. Users can choose to install it by clicking the More Add-In button on the home ribbon in Outlook and going to Admin > Manage. Or you can say “optional.” They tell you that the admin will be automatically deployed to the assigned users, but they can choose to remove it if they want. I’m going to fix it, and I’m just going to do this to everyone. even though I could sign it for just the salespeople if I wanted to. We’ll simply say everyone. In this case, I’m going to click “Deploy.” Now, notice the big catch to this whole thing. It tells you it could take up to 12 hours for it to actually take effect. So that is a downside. Working with Exchange Online does take some time. Okay, so at that point, we’re good. We can close this out of this.And now I’ll open up Outlook and show you where things will show up in Outlook. So pull out your phone and look up here. If you click on the “add-ins” button, this is where add-ons will appear. Okay, now again, it can take up to 12 hours for those add-ins to appear. However, once added, the add-in will appear in this small ribbon. All right, so that is how you can manage add-ins and Exchange.
