Hi Ravi, Answers inline... -----Original Message----- From: Ravishankar_EN [mailto:ravishankar_en@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, 21 August 2003 5:42 PM To: [ExchangeList] Subject: [exchangelist] Re: Exchange server New Setup Info http://www.MSExchange.org/ Dear friends, Iam ravi from banagalore. i have some questions on exchange server. My Criterias: 1) My company recently took a domain as eselinc.com 2) web space has been provided by one of the US based company to upload my web home page and the facility of creating a mailboxes, max of 50. Queries: 1) My director has asked me to create centralized mailing system for us. Here answer is Exchange server is a answer. But how do i take full conrol of my exchange server. The main mail server is is maintained by Us based company who is just a web space provider NOT a branch office or related to our office. A1) Your mail would appear to currently be a POP type setup, similar to what a home user would use. Separate users download their own mailboxes from the ISP (assume rediff?). Exchange (and other MXs) are different in that they themselves host your mailboxes, and CAN transmit mail directly to other MXs. You can choose to relay exchange mail thru an external "smarthost" if you don't wish to host your own DNS server. The major step this will involve is getting assigned a internet address range to use for your company, and assigning one of those IPs as the MX record to point to your new exchange server. 2) what is the basic things for the organisations to have before and after installing and to have exchange server. A2) see above. If you aren't familiar with this then I strongly suggest you get some help with the setup, possibly from your ISP. 3) what kind of exchange server i need to have and on what platfor and version does it suit for us as ours is a streangth of a max of 25-30 employees. A3) you would be looking at exchange server standard edition. Whether to choose 2000 or 2003 is dependant on other things like what is your current setup (ie. AD in use/current server OS, client OS, client office version, WAN setup, etc.) and your skills on each version. Generally I would go with 2003 if possible for the increased lifetime of the product, and avoid the inevitable upgrade later on. 4) Is there any way to check my entire organisations mails through exchange server? and i do want to keep a copy of the mails in my local exchange server not on remote mail server, which is provided by the US based compnay. Here it means, our employees check their respective mails, they should get a mails from my exchange server. A4) with exchange server all is possible :} 5) How do i synchronize the entire organisations mails from remote mail server? A5) I think what you're missing is that with exchange you won't need or want the old remote server. You will probably want to get all of the mail off the old server first into PSTs, then you can dump that back into the system when exchange is ready. 6) is there any way to receive all the emails to my exchagne server instead of from 3rd party remote mail server? A6) with the MX record mentioned above that's what happens. While it may be expensive to get an exchange professional in to help set it up it will more than pay for itself with less frustration, aggravation and possible security problems. And of course ask every question you can while they're there. Sure it annoys them, but that's what they're paid for right? Jamie.