I am trying to figure out if there is a way to set up an Exchange server with the following criteria:
Background - our company is changing names and adding global partners.
Many addresses @domainA.com will be local users that connect to their existing mailboxes on the server.
Other addresses @domainA.com will be users who are running other mail services (not necessarily Exchange servers) located remotely in other parts of the world. These may be their own mail servers or a service provider like an ISP or Google Business Apps.
Internal and External email should be delivered to the local users where appropriate, but should be forwarded to the destination mail server for delivery for those users who are not members of the local domain.
Everyone should be able to send and receive from their @domainA.com address.
Is it possible to run this kind of set-up, and if so, what features or setup do I need to research?
Thank you in advance.
You can only have one set of MX records, which means your server would have to be responsible for delivery of all the other sites. Then to route the email to the correct server you would need to have contacts and dummy domains all over the place.
The option I have seen most common for this scenario is sub domains.
So you would have @ location.example.com
That would allow you to have separate MX records for each office and it doesn't matter where they host it.
Another option would be to use a cloud service that can do location based routing, again it will require some degree of manual work to maintain.
It is going to be almost impossible to have anything automatic.
Simon.