Because the connector from Exchange to Domino is no longer being supported by Microsoft and my company is not big enough to merit the purchase of a 3rd party app, we’ve been asked to route all mail between Domino and Exchange via SMTP.
I’m a former full-time admin and I maintain our current environment even though I’m also the developer. I haven’t touched mail routing in many years so I thought I would double check here to make sure that I am doing the right thing.
We currently have a Foreign Domain doc in our NAB that points to the foreign domain “Exchange”. This doc points to the server that has exchange.box and exchange.box. We currently have a secondary address book that has all of the exchange book entries.
Each person doc in this secondary address book has “Exchange” as the domain and their internal exchange name as the full name (user/domain/company). Am I better off removing the “exchange” domain in the person doc and inserting their external exchange address (user@company.com)? Or is there something I can do in the foreign domain rule that could be changed to handle this? I can’t imagine what that would be but I thought I would ask :-).
When you route mail between Domino and Exchange you will encounter a couple of issues.
First off, iCal has been implemented differently between Domino and Exchange. Repeating meetings are going to be a problem. For example going from Notes to Exchange with a reschedule of all elements of a repeating meeting will result in the first one being rescheduled and all remaining ones being cancelled. Updating one meeting with a new location or information or all meetings with new information or locations will not update on Exchange.
Additionally with the internal subdomain you have setup for routing your Notes clients will perform iCal and MIME conversions locally which will yield inconsistent results. As for routing you can remove the internal subdomain information from the addresses and have them route externally but this will open them up to interception and access via the web.
Additionally if any of your Notes Applications send objects such as buttons, embedded forms, computed text, etc, then these too will be lost. I understand your predicament but as long as you and your management is aware this and are ready for the related issues. Go for it. Other wise check out http://www.binarytree.com/products/cmtco.aspx
Thank you very much for your response. Only the developers (4 of us) use domino for mail so everyone else is on Exchange. We have a series of web apps that route mail to the exchange user (nothing with any kind of notes functionality) but that’s about it. We did look at Binary’s product while at Lotusphere but I would have a tough time justifying the cost as we are a small company and SMTP should work fine.
So the way to go is simply to put the external addresses into the person docs of the exchange users?
Accepted Domains - Add a New Accepted Domain for yourcompanydomain.com - make it Authoritative
Send Connectors - Add an Address Space of SMTP type, Address yourcompanydomain.com on the Network tab choose Route mail through the following smart host and add your Lotus Notes hub on the Source Server add all of your Exchange hubs.
These settings work in my environment. Yours settings may be different depending on your mail routing topology.
You are forgeting about the contacts. I know there are 4 of you but in case you need them, you can create a local account to your Exchange server through LDAP and you can use that to send email to the Exchange server.
Smart host is the way of go. It does work. Although I am assuming you have Exchange 2007? The connector has support until 6.5. Have you tried keeping the Notes Client making the connection in that version?
One error you might encounter is that mails will route to Exchange but they won’t go to Domino because there is a service in the Exchange Connector that doesn’t start. At least that’s happened to me and I had to set up Smart Host like the guy above recommended.