Hiya Folks, most of us know that the Exchange Management Extensions for Exchange 2003 are not supported – or do not work on Windows Vista, however – there is a way that you can get the Active Directory Users and Computers Snap-in to work with Windows Vista which will allow you to manage Exchange attributes.

In this post I would like to take you through getting ADUC with the Exchange extensions to work under Windows Vista.

Firstly in order for this to work you will need;

• A download of the Windows 2003 SP1 Adminpak.msi file, which can be obtained from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c16ae515-c8f4-47ef-a1e4-a8dcbacff8e3&displaylang=en
• Your Windows Vista computer to be a member of the domain that contains the Exchange Server that you wish to manage using ADUC
• Be logged onto the Vista machine with an account that has permissions to administer the local machine and the domain (or modify accounts in AD)
• You will need the following files from your Exchange Server (these may be located in the Windows\system32 folder or in the program files\exchsrvr\bin folder);
  • exchmem.dll
  • glblname.dll
  • Address.dll
  • maildsmx.dll
  • netui0.dll
  • netui1.dll
  • netui2.dll
  • pttrace.dll

Addtionally I would suggest that you copy over the “Active Directory Users and Computers.msc” file from the c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin directory on your Exchange server to a location on your machine (this will ensure that you have the latest version of the msc)

Follow the guidance from for installing the Adminpak.msi on Vista from Daniel Petri’s site, which is located here: http://www.petri.co.il/running_win_2003_adminpak_on_vista_rtm.htm

Copy all of the DLL’s mentioned above to the c:\windows\system32 folder then run the following command line regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\maildsmx.dll

You should now be able to open up the ADUC and manage users accounts as you normally would from you Windows Vista Session.