AD Attributes required for automatic Exchange provisioning

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I’ve been doing a lot of work recently getting our FIM ready to provision and manage mailboxes and other objects in Exchange 2013 and, in doing so, I have made much reference to a table of attributes required for different object types which only seems to exist in the form of an image.

The authoritative source for this information is from Technet but doesn’t seem to have been updated for Exchange 2013. The closest I’ve come to something from Microsoft has been the Update-Recipient documentation but that only refers to MailboxUser attributes.

Here is list of required attributes for Exchange 2013 to make automatic provisioning work:

  • Mailbox user
    • mailNickname (eg “foo” – the local part of the email address)
    • homeMDB (user’s mailbox database)
    • msExchHomeServerName (user’s mailbox database server)
  • Mail enabled user & Mail enabled contact
    • mailNickname
    • targetAddress (eg. “SMTP:foo@example.com”)

Some time after these attributes are set or unset (or when Update-Recipient is called on that user object), Exchange will “do the right thing” 🙂

Other useful attributes

  • Mailbox user
    • msExchMailboxGuid (Exchange will invent one if it’s not there)
    • msExchArchiveDatabaseLink (same as msExchHomeServerName but for Archive mailbox)
    • msExchArchiveName (text used in OWA to describe the Archive mailbox)
    • msExchArchiveGUID (mailbox guid for Archive which you seem to have to invent!)
    • msExchELCMailboxFlags (magic flags used for various things including enabling Archive mailbox – see this post for more information)
    • mDBUseDefaults needs setting to TRUE to persuade Exchange to apply the default quota policy
    • msExchPoliciesExcluded & msExchPoliciesIncluded seem to control which of a subset of the plethora of policies get applied to an account. We’re using this to stop the Default Email Address Policy from applying to managed mailboxes. With a little trial-and-error you can move the {GUID} from included to excluded and presto! 🙂 Without this Exchange will fight with FIM if it disagrees with proxyAddress changes 🙁
  • proxyAddresses (multivalued list of valid addresses for this user) Eg.
    • SMTP:foo@example.com
    • smtp:john.smith@example.com
  • msExchSenderHintTranslations – Mailtip text, can’t find any documentation on how this is supposed to work but I’ve been using a value of “default:<html><body>$text to be displayed</body></html>” which seems to do the right thing 🙂

If there are more that would be useful to go on this list then please let me know!

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