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FIM has some excellent integration with Office and Exchange 2007 that can really elevate your ROI story in large organizations, but not everyone out there is on Exchange or Exchange 2007. For those customers still on Exchange 2003 or a competing platform, I'm going to show you how to still take advantage of the notification capabilities of FIM 2010 with any old SMTP platform.

Without Exchange 2007, the approval and notification features are:

• Approvals can be sent and received in any email client, but not approved within Outlook, even if you have Outlook 2007; you require both Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007 for the entire process to work. The experience here will direct the recipient to go to the portal and complete the approval or rejection process.
• The FIM Outlook 2007 plug-ins for Group Self-service will not function without Exchange 2007.
• Notifications can always be sent regardless of email system. Notifications are "fire and forget" and do not require FIM to monitor for replies.

There are four keys I'd like to draw your attention to in the Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Service.exe.config file that define each instance of your FIM Service:

• mailServer – you have two options here:
• Exchange 2007 – this is the http path to the Exchange web services
• Exchange 2003/Other SMTP – the smtp server address
• isExchange – Only set this to 1 if this is Exchange 2007, even if it's Exchange 2003
• sendAsAddress – the SMTP formatted address you are sending from, must correspond to the address assigned to you FIM WS account
• synchronizationServerName – no effect on mail delivery, but this has to be set to the server or virtual server (in the case of cluster config) your sync service is installed on

Below is a typical configuration for a non-Exchange 2007 configuration:

<appSettings>
    <add key="mailServer" value="mail.domain.com" />
    <add key="isExchange" value="0" />
    <add key="sendAsAddress" value="" />
    <add key="synchronizationServerName" value="syncserver" />
appSettings>