Best practice for Active Directory User Templates regarding Distribution Lists

Question

Hello All
I am looking to implement Active Directory User templates for each department in the company to make the process of creating user accounts for new employees easier. Currently when a user is created a current user's Active directory account is copied, but
this has led to problems with new employees being added to groups which they should not be a part of.
I have attempted to implement this in the past but ran into an issue regarding Distribution Lists. I would like to set up template users with all group memberships that are needed for the department, including distribution lists. Previously I set this up
but received complaints from users who would send e-mail to distribution lists the template accounts were members of.
When sending an e-mail to the distribution list with a member template user, users received an error because the template account does not have an e-mail address.
What is the best practice regarding template user accounts as it pertains to distribution lists? It seems like I will have to create a mailbox for each template user but I can't help but feel there is a better way to avoid this problem. If a mailbox is created
for each template user, it will prevent the error messages users were receiving, but messages will simply build up in these mailboxes. I could set a rule for each one that deletes messages, but again I feel like there is a better way which I haven't thought
of.
Has anyone come up with a better method of doing this?
Thank you

Answer 1

You can just add arbitrary email (not a mailbox) to all your templates and it should solve the problem with errors when sending emails to distribution lists.
If you want to further simplify your user creation process you can have a look at Adaxes (consider it's a third-party app). If you want to use templates, it gives you a slightly better way to do that (http://www.adaxes.com/tutorials_WebInterfaceCustomization_AllowUsingTemplatesForUserCreation.htm)
and it also can automatically perform tasks such as mailbox creation for newly created users (http://www.adaxes.com/tutorials_AutomatingDailyTasks_AutomateExchangeMailboxesCreationForNewUsers.htm).
Alternatively you can abandon templates at all and use customizable condition-based rules to automatically perform all the needed tasks on user creation such as OU allocation, group membership assignment, mailbox creation, home folder creation, etc. based on
the factors you predefine for them.