I have upgraded my exchange 2003 environment and built 3 new Exchange 2007 servers. 1 Mailbox role, 1 Client Access role, and 1 Hub transport role. I still have my Exchange 2003 server in the domain. I have my mail.domain.com point to my exchange 2003 server. I want to change this to my exchange 2007 server and decommission the 2003 server. Which Exchange 2007 server should get mail.domain.com. I have inherited this exchange environment and we are having a debate. Some people say I should make the mail.domain.com my hub transport server and some say it should be the mailbox server. Does anyone know the best practice for this? The way it is now is the mail.domain.com is my hub transport server - this allows scanners which 'scan-to-email' work, but outlook clients who have an MST file pointing new profiles to mail.domain.com - the outlook won't resolve the name. If I use mail.domain.com as my mailbox server - then outlook clients will work but scanners which 'scan-to-email' will not work. I believe the scanners will not work because I cannot go to a command prompt and type 'telnet 'mailbox-server' 25' - I CAN do this on the hub transport server. I'm thinking mail.domain.com needs to be the mailbox server and SMTP needs to be enabled so we can telnet into it - this will allow scanners to function and outlook clients to function. Any help is greatly appreciated as I do not consider myself an exchange engineer - some of you gathered that by my question :)Zach Smith

Hi Zach From what I understand of your post you need to point the scanners to the Hub transport server, you can create a new A-record for it if you want, but you can also just point them directly to the servername. Whether or not the mail.domain.com should point to the mailbox server depends on what you are doing with certificates. In exchange 2003 you only used one name on the certificate, in Exchange 2007 we normally use 3-4 names in the certificate. I would recommend getting a new certificate for the Exchange 2007 server, this way you can get all the names in you want. I normally include the following: mail.domain.com, autodiscover.domain.com, CAS.internaldomain.local,cas(netbios) /MartinExchange is a passion not just a collaboration software.

Thanks for the reply MArtin. You lost me with the statement about certificates. If I want a web application to send an email or a scanner to send an email - why do I need a certificate? I'm confused. ZachZach Smith

Hi Zach Sorry for confusing. For just relaying mail you don't need a certificate at all. For just having a web application or scanner sending mail you just need to point it to the Hub transport server and remember to create or edit the receive connector in Exchange to allow the web server / scanner to relay mails through Exchange. /MartinExchange is a passion not just a collaboration software.

Hi Zach, Any updates on this issue? If “mail.domain.com” is only used to point the scanners to the Hub transport Server, you can just add a new record for your Hub transport Server. If your scanner have any other requirements, please describe how your scanner works in detail. Thanks, Evan Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.