This topic explains the support that Microsoft Provisioning System provides for provisioning Microsoft Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server messaging and collaboration services.
Microsoft Provisioning System uses Exchange Provider and Managed Exchange namespace to provide automatic provisioning and delegated administration of Exchange mailboxes and public folders for reseller and customer organizations. For more information about Exchange Provider, see Exchange Provider. For more information about Managed Exchange namespace, see Managed Exchange.
You can enable Exchange services for an organization and manage mailboxes by using Delegated Administration Console. You cannot, however, create and manage public folders by using Delegated Administration Console. These are features of Managed Exchange namespace, and you can access them by using direct XML requests, as described in Administering public folders by using XML. For these requests, Microsoft Provisioning System handles access control just as it does for requests originating from Delegated Administration Console. For more information, see "Exchange access control" in Exchange 2000 Server implementation architecture. For more information about using Delegated Administration Console to work with Exchange, see Working with Exchange services.
Additional functionality, such as creating and managing contacts, is available through Exchange Provider. You can access this functionality by creating a custom namespace. For more information about creating custom namespaces, see Developing and implementing custom namespaces.
When you provision Exchange services for an organization, Microsoft Provisioning System creates a recipient policy for the organization in Exchange and configures the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) servers with the organization's domain name. The name you provide for the organization must be a valid Internet domain name in order for Exchange to function.