Our institution is looking at bringing our exchange email service in house. I am not very familiar with the setup of exchange and wanted to explore some options and see if this will be worth the hassle. Our current internal domain is based on server 2003 with no exchange server. In researching I'm finding for security purposes you don't want your external email on an internal domain with this said would there be a way possible to setup windows authentication when opening email for external.com domain from a computer on our internal.local domain. Also would it be better putting the exchange server in a DMZ zone or just behind our firewall on the internal network.

Hi First if I was you I would take a look at the following link, it will provide you will all necessary steps to deploy exchange into your organization.. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exdeploy2010/default.aspx Exchange 2007 and later should be put on the internal LAN, not DMZ... except the edge role, that's the only one that should be in DMZ. And it's no problem with the domains, just setup the accepted domains and a proper email address policy. Hope this will help you to proceed :-) Jonas Andersson MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Configuration | MCITP: EMA | MCSE/MCSA Blog: http://www.testlabs.se/blog

Hi- There's nothing wrong with Exchange being joined to an "internal" domain. That's very common. You'll want to put the box behind the firewall rather than in the DMZ.Active Directory, 4th Edition - www.briandesmond.com/ad4/

Exchange server must be part of an Active Directory. You won’t able to install Exchange without an Active Directory Domain. If you are talking about Internal and External Domain names, you can use any name for your Active Directory. AD name doesn’t have to be the same as your email address name. Here are some good information about Exchange deployment: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998636.aspx Santhosh Sivarajan | MCTS, MCSE (W2K3/W2K/NT4), MCSA (W2K3/W2K/MSG), CCNA, Network+ Houston, TX http://blogs.sivarajan.com/ http://publications.sivarajan.com/ This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.