Saturday, October 13, 2007

E2K7 Adding Delegates to Other Users' Accounts

For a migration into Exchange 2003/2007 we recommend you not have set Delegates. Those of you who have left your Delegates on in your lab and migated a few years worth of data have seen why: very full delegate inboxes, and very irate delegates.


The problem still remains: What's the best way to set Delegates AFTER a migration? You could use this as a learning opportunity for your users: let THEM set their own darn delegates, thank you very much.


But sometimes your user community is more demanding and wants (nay, NEEDS) this all done for them.


We have an account in Connecticut (thank you, Vince) who wrote up this account of how to set Delegates for calendars in Exchange 2007 (do not attempt on E2K3). This assumes your Exchange Admin account with adequate permissions to execute (and you know that is its own separate issue) is called "sumatra"
  1. Logon to Windows box as yourself.

  2. Delete the "sumatra" account if it is in C:\documents and setting. If it is not there then it will be after this first account adjustment. You are good for the 1st run.

  3. Locate the Outlook app and "Run as..." and run as the Domain Administrator

  4. Setup the user you want to add Delegates to

  5. Once done you will be asked to logon, again. This time logon as "sumatra"

  6. The account will then be setup in the app.

  7. Set your Delegates.

  8. When done close Outlook

  9. Delete the sumatra account (as mentioned in step 2) and the administrator account.

  10. Repeat steps 3-9 until you are done with your account setup.

All bets are off once sp1 hits the street -- we can almost guarantee this process will change.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, did the process change for SP1? Any follow-up advice? This is an annoying hole in Exchange administration, don't you think? Sure, it would be nice if users could/would do this themselves, but it doesn't always happen that way. And then you have users on Macs...

zyg said...

Actually SP1 includes some new capability for setting Delegates programmatically. We haven't had time to dig into it yet, but we'll post it when we do.