Messaging….. Technology…… Life…..

Adding an SMTP domain to play with is the first step in configuring an Exchange implementation with Microsoft Online — obviously if you are only going to use the sharepoint or livemeeting feature, this isn’t the first step… The example I am going to go with is using Joshmaher.org and am going to make it authoritive for my namespace. There is an option to use Microsoft Online as an external relay. This would be the case if you have an Exchange organization internally or hosted somewhere that is authoritive for the domain and your intention is to configure Microsoft Online for a few only a few users.

If your intention is to actually migrate to Microsoft Online right now (careful it is buggy at the moment), selecting the external relay option would be the correct first step. This way, users can be migrated (discussed in a later post), while the microsoft online smtp namespace co-exists with your existing email solution. Once the migration is complete, moving to an authoritive namespace and re-configuring your MX record would be appropriate.

The interesting thing here is that if you are familiar with Exchange implementations or configurations, this setting really does relate to the “authoritive” setting in the SMTP domain configuration for your org. With this in mind, the configuration that follows is fairly intuitive and easy for someone less familiar exchange to configure….

Once you have configured your SMTP domain, you have to verify the domain (so that you aren’t stealing people’s namespaces).

To verify you own the domain, Microsoft is asking you to place the following CNAME in your DNS configuration:

CNAME: 287d1912-3755-4273-b567-11bc7e20107f.joshmaher.net
Target FQDN: red001.mail.microsoftonline.com

Once the CNAME is configured, hit the verify button and….

A simple dialog box shows up with either of two options:

An error (you didn’t add the CNAME correctly — OR — Microsoft Online crapped out)

A success dialog box where you can simply click FINISH and move on.