Specifying an Exchange Alias or mailNickName

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Specifying an Exchange Alias or mailNickName

In an Enterprise Exchange deployment, the Exchange Alias is by default the same as the User Logon Name (Pre-Microsoft Windows 2000) or Active Directory attribute sAMAccountName, and is stored in Active Directory as the mailNickName.

In a Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration deployment, Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) by default builds the mailNickName based on the initial of the user's first name followed by that user's surname. So "John Chen" would have a Microsoft Exchange Server alias of "jchen". If more than one "John Chen" exists in multiple hosted organizations, the associated mailboxes will be named with duplicate Exchange aliases of "jchen".

Having multiple mailboxes with the same Exchange alias will not cause problems unless you allow users to login to POP3 and IMAP services with the User Logon Name (Pre-Windows 2000). In this scenario, you should not use the default MPS behavior but instead set the Exchange Alias/mailNickName attribute to be the same as the sAMAccountName.