ECP (Exchange Control Panel)

ECP (Exchange Control Panel) can manage mailboxes, Distribution Groups, Contacts at mailbox level and several other objects at Organization level, such as Journaling, Transport Rules, Delivery Reports and so forth.

The ECP authentication by default follows the Outlook Web App settings but we can manage that separately on the Client Access Server, Exchange Control Panel tab as shown in

Figure 01

 Figure 01

So, if you have already configured your Outlook Web App and it is working like a charm, let’s try the https://yourdomain.com/ECP and here you will get access to the management stuff using the same authentication process that we would use to access Outlook Web App. The main page is similar to the one shown in Figure 02, where we have four categories: Users & Groups, Roles & Auditing, Mail Control, Phone & Voice and each one of them has sub categories.

Figure 02

If you are already logged on in Outlook Web App, you can click Options and then See all Options, and then click on the option Manage Myself and change to My Organization.  All areas that the current user has access will be available to be managed through the web interface.

Managing Mailboxes

On the first page we can solve one of the most asked questions around Exchange Control Panel which is the ability to create new Mailboxes, the answer is simple: No. The feature was removed in the RTM release of the product.

A list of all mailboxes will be listed on the initial page, and we can use the Select View field which has All Mailboxes, user mailboxes, Room mailboxes or Mailboxes on litigation hold to sort the mailboxes that are being listed based on those attributes. We can also search a specific mailbox typing in the field right below Details and Refresh buttons. In the same field we can use a wildcard, for example, if you want to list all users that end with 01, just type in *01 and here you have the results (figure 03).