Certificates and Exchange have always been a challenging topic. In Exchange 2007, it was a real endeavor to get the right certificates up and running, by using the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets Get-ExchangeCertificate, New-ExchangeCertificate, Import-ExchangeCerticate, Enable-ExchangeCertificate and so on. Not to mention the problems you could have if names were not as they were supposed to be...

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft has made an effort to include in the Exchange Management Console a very nice Exchange Certificate management interface, that allows you as an administrator to create a Certificate Requets using the GUI, import an Exchange Certifcicate, and enable an Exchange Certificate for any service of choice.

Let's have a look.

When you open the Exchange Management Console, and drill down to Server Configuration, select a server in the middle pane, and you will see in the bottom pane the list of Exchange Certificates available in the certificate store of that server.

When you right-click your Exchange Server, you can select New Exchange Certificate, which will launch the New Exchange Certificate Wizard.

After defining a friendly name, you are ready to provide all needed information:

After clicking Finish, you will have a certificate request that you can use ti get a certificate from your own CA, or from an external CA. The Exchange Management Console will show the request as well.

After receiving the certificate, you can use the Exchange Management Console to import the certificate by selecting Complete Pending Request, and enable it for all wanted services. While running the "Complete Pending Request" my Exchange Management Console stopped, and gave me a Monad error, but after relaunching the console I could assign the certificate to both IIS, and SMTP.

A nice improvement in Exchange 2010 :-)

-Ilse