recipient policy

worked like a charm, i place a filter in the office category, NY and JP. then like you said creted a new recipient policy.

I was looking at the public fodlers and contact on each server and everything was being in sync, are there any other entity that's being sync that I do not know of? liek a useful feature?

matt,

more importantly is this a good setup? would you recommnd this? or this has a single point of failure?

With proper configuration, you won't have a single point-of-failure in your environment. You can configure MX records on both the @JP and @NY email domains so they point to Exchange Servers in both sites, with the intended site (NY for @NY and JP for @JP) with highest priority. That way, if the server in one site goes down, you can queue mail at the other end for up to 48 hours while the issue is resolved.

>> I was looking at the public fodlers and contact on each server and everything was being in sync, are there any other entity that's being sync that I do not know of? liek a useful feature

I'm not sure what you're mentioning there. The best way to check Public Folder Sync is in ESM.

-Matt

I turned off the AD and the web mail wasn't working for both sites. Did I do something wrong?

You didn't do anything wrong. Exchange depends on Active Directory for everything; if it has no Domain Controller to communicate with, everything will fall over. Ideally, you'd be installing at least 2 Domain Controllers on your network for resilience purposes in the event one failed.

-Matt

matt thank you so much for everything. you are one amazing guy. So sorry to be off topic. but I'd like to learn more on the proper configuration you mentioned earlier, this is very very important, how can I go about the configs?

>>With proper configuration, you won't have a single point-of-failure in your environment. You can configure MX records on both the @JP and @NY email domains so they point to Exchange Servers in both sites, with the intended site (NY for @NY and JP for @JP) with highest priority. That way, if the server in one site goes down, you can queue mail at the other end for up to 48 hours while the issue is resolved.
<<

The MX records are what control which server(s) are responsible for receiving email for your network. Since your Exchange Servers are going to be part of the same Active Directory domain (and therefore the same Exchange organization), you can use each server as a temporary 'backup' server, where mail can queue if the other server is offline.

What you need to do is create two A records, say nymail.domain.com and jpmail.domain.com, and map them to the public static IP at that location.

Then, configure the MX records for jp.domain.com with jpmail.domain.com as the preferred server (lower cost number, which = highest preference), and nymail.domain.com as an additional MX with a higher cost. Use, say, costs of 5 and 10 respectively, as an example. Repeat, but in reverse for the ny.domain.com domain.

This essentially means all mail destined for NY will attempt to be delivered direct to NY first, but can be delivered to JP and queued there until NY becomes available if necessary (and the same, in reverse, for the JP domain).

Thanks for the kind words BTW :-)

-Matt

what do you meant by "queued" until the other one comes up? does this mean, email sent to the site that's having problems wont be lost but users wont also be able to open them until everything comes online?

Pretty much. Queued email is like email in storage; it's not reached its final delivery point (where user mailboxes are located), but it is held within your system. There is a limit on the queues and email will be returned to the sender as undeliverable if the email sits queued for too long without being delivered.

-Matt

is there a posibility to have a realtime back in place? like when NY goes down, users will automatically be routed to jp with their mailboxes there also, everything would be seemless to the users?

For that, you'd need some form of cluster. You could either implement an Exchange-based cluster (very costly) or use third-party software. DoubleTake is the commonly recommended product for doing this. It will replicate mailboxes between the two servers, and failover automatically if one goes down.

http://www.doubletake.com

-Matt