Creating New Organizations

Hosted Exchange uses “Service Plans” to control what organizations have access to what features. With service plans you can turn features on or off like POP, MAPI, ActiveSync, and even mailbox sizes. So open Windows Explorer and browse to:

c:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\ServicePlans

You will notice that there are sample service plans and CSV files called “ServicePlanHostingRemap”. It is very important you do not use the samples because they can be replaced with updates. Just simply copy a sample and rename it. Then open the HostingRemap file and put in something for the ProgramId and OfferId. The last one is for the name of the filename.

Next you will want to go to the Exchange Shell to create a new organization. So type:

• $c = Get-Credential
• New-Organization -Name "My Lab Domain" -DomainName labdomain.com -Location en-US -ProgramId Lab -OfferId 2 -AdministratorPassword $c.password

The Parameters:

• Name – This is the name of the organization you are creating
• DomainName – This is the primary domain that it will create for the organization. So in this case the Administrator account will be administrator@labdomain.com. It will use this to login and it will be the primary accept domain.
• Location – Your location / language. Don’t think I need to go into this one much 
• ProgramId – This is the name of the Program that we created in our CSV file above
• OfferId – This is the offer id that corresponds  to the program id that we created in our CSV file above
• AdministratorPassword – This is optional but what I like about it is it will automatically create the administrator user for you. As you can see we are assigning the password that we stored in the $c variable. Using this command allows you to login using the ECP as administrator to create more users. Leaving this off will result in you having to write another Powershell command to create the first mailbox, and then you will be able to login to ECP to create more users.

The service plan I applied has mailbox size limits of 2gb. So each user that is created under this organization will only be allowed to have 2gb. We will get into how to modify a service plan.

Active Directory:

One thing you may notice is the differences in Active Directory from that of a regular Exchange install:

Each organization that you create will add another OU under the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Organizations.

So What Now?

Even though our Exchange is installed and we now have a organization with one mailbox (Administrator mailbox), we still do not have a working environment. We must configure the Send & Receive connectors. We will cover this in Step 3