The first change in your day to day management will be the new interface that Exchange 2013 has. Gone is the GUI and now a web management interface will be your main way to manage Exchange. See the below screenshot for the login screen:
Simply enter your credentials and click ‘Sign In’.
Once you log into the Exchange Admin Center, you will be presented with this screen:
Now that you are logged into the new management interface we can cover some common administrative tasks. For this article we’ll concentrate on Recipient Management. The first thing you will notice on this tab is the list of mailboxes that are displayed in the center of the page. Also note the user information displayed in the pane to the right noting name, email address, title, office, work phone, UM information, mobile phone information, compliance/archive settings, whether there is a hold in place, and OWA settings.
You can manage your mailboxes using the buttons above the list of mailboxes:
RECIPIENT/MAILBOX MANAGEMENT
The button on the far left can be used to create new mailboxes as well as new linked mailboxes. From the New Mailbox dialog box you can enter the information for the new mailbox.
Once all of the information has been entered you can click ‘Save’ and create your new mailbox.
Once the new mailbox has been created you can edit the mailbox:
From the ‘trashcan’ icon you can either delete or disable a mailbox.
If you click on the Search button a search field appears for you to type in what you are searching for:
Results are displayed below:
From the last button ‘…’ you can change the display of the Recipient Management page. Each one of these items adds a button to the list you are already familiar with.
The first option ‘Add/Remove columns” adds a button for column modification:
For example if you wanted to display the mailbox database for all mailboxes, simply check the box:
And the display is modified:
The next option down allows the information to be exported to a CSV file.
See below for a sample of the fields that can be chosen:
To reconnect a disconnected mailbox, select the third option on that menu:
The last option is an Advanced Search.
Enter what you want to search for an click ‘OK’.
If you are looking to manage a large number of mailboxes then PowerShell is your best option and not the Exchange Admin Center.
GROUP MANAGEMENT
The next tab is for Groups. The management is similar if not exactly the same as the one for mailboxes:
Some small differences are in the options shown when clicking on the icons above the groups:
For creating new groups, click on the ‘+’ button and then select the group you want to create:
If you click on the editing button you are presented with this screen:
From here you can you can see the various items that can be edited:
One notable exception would be on the ‘…’ menu:
Here we can create policies to control the naming of groups in Exchange.
This is an interesting nugget for name creation and the fact that this could be restricted. Even more useful would be if you could have a ‘dictionary’ or some preset file to void out certain types of words.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Creating a new Equipment Mailbox:
Resource properties:
The ‘…’ or what I would call the Options button allows for three things, to display additional columns, export the information to a CSV file and also Advanced Search.
