Evaluating the Hosted Exchange Application

Before deploying the Hosted Exchange application in a production environment, you can evaluate the application in a test environment. To facilitate the evaluation of the application, the application supports demo mode. In this mode, the application can work without Microsoft Exchange Server, which allows for the creation of subscriptions and management of Exchange objects, such as mailboxes, public folders, and so on, through UX1 for Customers without actual provisioning. For example: if you create a mailbox through UX1 for Customers, it is only created in the system database; if you modify settings of the mailbox through UX1 for Customers, the changes are stored in the system database. In other words, if the application is in demo mode, nothing is created, modified, or removed in Exchange Server even if it is installed and configured in your environment.

To evaluate the application, follow these steps:

1. Make sure that you have a supported version of CloudBlue Commerce in your test environment (see Prerequisites to obtain the list of supported versions).
2. Install the Messaging and Collaboration module.
3. Deploy the application as described in Deploying the Hosted Exchange Application.

4. Switch the application to demo mode:

   1. In your control panel, go to Services > Applications and select the APS Connectors tab.
   2. Click on ExchangeApplication.
   3. Click on the application instance that you need.
   4. Select the Exchange tab. Then, select the Configuration subtab and click Edit.
   5. Select the Demo Mode checkbox and click Save.
5. In the service templates Sample: Hosted Exchange and Sample: Hosted Exchange with Mailbox Types, set the limits on the resources Hosted Exchange Native to 0.
6. Create service plans for the service templates Sample: Hosted Exchange and Sample: Hosted Exchange with Mailbox Types.

After you perform these steps, you can start subscribing customer accounts to the service plans that you created.

As soon as you finish evaluating the application, you can switch the application to production mode and complete its deployment. To do this, you need to remove all subscriptions created in demo mode and switch the application to production mode by unchecking the Demo Mode checkbox.

Note: Before changing the mode of the application, you need to remove all subscriptions created in this mode. Otherwise, you will not be allowed to change the current mode.