Summary


Designing a new Exchange system is neither easy nor fast. You must complete several steps and then track back to ensure that you've taken each step's impact on other steps into account. Moving through this iterative process while covering each of the steps in painstaking detail ensures that your Exchange system will function pretty much as expected from the get-go and that costly redesign is kept to a minimum.

One of the most important steps is the allocation of responsibility for very specific stages of the design and implementation process. This should be the first step in the design process. It ensures that the right people with the right skills and knowledge are in place and that they are clearly in charge of and must account for their particular piece of the design puzzle.

Needs assessments are another key to effective Exchange system design. You must perform assessments of user need, the geographic distribution of your organization and its computing and networking resources, and your data network. Needs assessments focus not only on what new resources and ideas are required, but also on what can be preserved.

Exchange Server 2007 is a network-dependent, network-intensive system. You need to establish a consistent set of conventions for naming your Exchange organization, administrative groups, servers, and recipients. You must choose a Windows 2003 networking model that fits well with your organization's geographical distribution and business structures. You must define the boundaries of Exchange administrative groups, the administrative units you use in your Exchange organization. As with domain models, geographic distribution and business structures might be key to setting these boundaries. If required, you must define boundaries for Exchange routing groups and determine how your routing groups will communicate across wide area networks.

Next, you must design your Exchange servers, paying attention to performance, storage capacity, reliability, backup, and networking users. When you've designed your Exchange Server environment, you must deal with connecting your servers to other messaging systems, both public and private. Here you must select from among available Exchange connectors and gateways. As your Exchange network becomes a reality, you must ensure, through exhaustive testing, that everything works as planned and up to whatever performance, reliability, and other standards you must adhere to.

Finally, you need to develop a plan for rolling out your Exchange system when everything is ready and has been tested. You shouldn't expect everything to be perfect on first rollout. However, if you've adhered to the design steps laid out in this chapter, your rollout experience should be a fairly pleasant one.

In the next chapter, we will talk about Exchange Server 2007 installations and then in the following chapter we will talk about upgrading from Exchange Server 2000/2003 to Exchange Server 2007. Even if you don't need to do an upgrade, we encourage you to read the next chapter. Thinking through the upgrade process will help you better understand the inner workings of Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2007.




Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1
ISBN: 0470417331
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 198
Authors: Jim McBee

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