Managing Inter-Organization Replication

You can share public folder and free/busy information between two or more organizations in different Active Directory forests using the Inter-Organization Replication tool. To download the Inter-Organization Replication tool, see Downloads for Exchange Server 2003. The utility package contains two applications:

• Microsoft Exchange Server Replication Configuration utility (Exscfg.exe)

• Microsoft Exchange Server Replication Service (Exssrv.exe)

This package also contains documentation that describes how to set up inter-organizational replication. For more information about inter-organizational replication, see Exchange Server 2003 Deployment Guide.

After you have configured the Exchange organizations, you can use this utility to coordinate meetings, appointments, and contact information between the members of the two organizations. As shown in the following figure, the inter-organizational replication process involves one Exchange server in each forest. One server acts as a publisher and sends information to the second server (the subscriber).

Using publisher and subscriber servers to replicate information between forests

To configure the Inter-Organization Replication tool, follow the instructions provided in the readme file that accompanies the tool. When you have finished the configuration process, you will have the following:

• At the first level of both the publishing public folder tree and the subscribing public folder tree, a public folder named ExchsyncSecurityFolder.

• For each first-level public folder in the publishing tree that you want to replicate, a corresponding target folder in the subscribing tree. (Subfolders in the subscribing tree will be created automatically.)

• A mailbox-enabled account that has the following:

  • Local administrator rights on both the publisher server and the subscriber server.

  • Owner permission on both copies of ExchsyncSecurityFolder.

  • Owner permission on the folders to be replicated and the corresponding target folders.

• Session configuration settings for one free/busy replication session.

• Session configuration settings for one or more public folder replication sessions. If you need to tune your replication traffic, you can create public folder sessions that replicate at different times and at different intervals.