Saving on certificates in an multi-tenant Exchange environment

By default, alot of companies buy certificates for Exchange based on the domains that are added to Exchange.
While a company is expanding, it can be very expensive.

In an organization using enormous amounts of domains, it can be challenging to keep up with certificates.
These issues you don’t have with Office 365, since Microsoft is responsible for Autodiscover.

When hosting your own multi-tenant Exchange environment, you can actually use an SRV record instead of an CNAME or A record.
This way it will announce that the corresponding service is hosted elsewhere.

This way you only need the (likely wildcard) certificate of the providing company.
Example:
You have an serviceprovider called Adatum Services, which hosts autodiscover.adatumservices.com.
The IT admin adds a domain (contosoconsultancy.com) to the multi-tenant Exchange environment.
Instead of adding an A record to the Exchange Client Access Server, you add an SRV record telling the Outlook client that the Autodiscover service is hosted elsewhere: on autodiscover.adatumservices.com.

The record for contosoconsultancy.com would look as:
Name: @
Protocol: TCP
Port: 443
Service: _Autodiscover
Target: autodiscover.adatumservices.com
Priority: 10
Weight: 1

Now you don’t have to make changes to your certificates, everytime an domain is added to your Exchange environment.

Posted in Collaboration, Exchange (General)

 

 

User interaction script for SCCM

This script (made by me) allows you to use user-interaction to notify your users about an installation or update of software.
It also allows you to push an installation (with administrator priviliges), while still including the user in the process.

If there is no interaction within 20 seconds per notification, it will go on.

You can also specify a process to check, and notify the user that the application needs to be closed to continue the installation (if the process is running off course).
It will re-check every 20 seconds, but will not continue until the process is closed.

This means that if the user isn’t behind his/her desk, and nothing conflicting is running, it will continue.
This makes the process of installing and updating software a lot more user friendly, but will not compromise compliance.

Download from Technet