Exchange Server 2007 includes five roles – Mailbox, Client Access, Hub Transport, Unified Messaging and Edge Transport Server Role.
In this Step-by-Step Screencast, we will demonstrate the installation and configuration of the Edge Transport Server Role. The primary responsibility of the Edge Server is to function as an SMTP gateway and protect your messaging system from viruses and spam. It provides a lot of features which you might find useful when designing and implementing the messaging infrastructure in your organization. Some of the most important features are:
– Sender filtering
– Sender ID lookup
– Recipient filtering
– Recipient lookup
– Connection filtering
– Content filtering
– Header filtering
– Attachment filtering
– Virus Scanning
– Rules processing

It is important to point out that:
– The Edge server checks only SMTP traffic – all inbound and outbound e-mails for your organization should be flowing through it.
– You cannot use the Edge server for OWA (Outlook Web Access), Outlook Anywhere, POP3, IMAP access.
– You cannot install any other Exchange Role on and Edge Transport Server – as you can see in the video, once you check the Edge server role box, all other roles are grayed out.
– The Edge server should be installed in DMZ as a workgroup machine – it is not a member of your internal Active Directory domain.
– The MX record for your domain(s) should be pointing to Edge Server’s public IP – all inbound traffic should be flowing through it.
– The Edge server uses AD LDS (Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services) when installed on Windows Server 2008, or ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) – when installed on Windows Server 2003.

In the following Screencast, we demonstrate the installation and initial synchronization of Edge Transport server on Windows 2008 OS in a DMZ.
To keep things simple, we will dedicate separate Screencasts for configuring and demonstrating the anti-virus, anti-spam and other filtering features in Exchange 2007 Edge Transport Server.

You can download the text file with Exchange Management Shell commands, here.

Step 1 We start by taking a look at our network diagram and our existing Exchange configuration.

Step 2 Next, we prepare the new Edge server – set its name, DNS suffix, workgroup membership. Then we install the edge server prerequisites and proceed with the installation of Edge Transport Server role.

Step 3 This step is very important as most Edge server problems are connected with name resolution issues or firewall ports configuration. We adjust and test the name resolution on both the Edge and Hub server. Then we test the ports required for normal communication between the Edge and Hub server.

Step 4 Finally, we are ready to subscribe the Edge Server to our Exchange 2007 organization. We generate an XML subscription file, then we import it in the HUB server, force initial EdgeSync replication, and check the result on both servers.