Chapter 5: Assessing Needs

Overview

Proper planning is valuable in any project, but in a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 deployment, planning is especially critical. Many Exchange Server components are difficult or impossible to change after installation. Poor planning can cause problems that range from inadequate performance to outright failure of components.

We’ve broken our discussion of planning into two chapters. This chapter helps you gather the information you will need to plan your implementation of Exchange Server 2003. It looks at the business requirements of the enterprise, examines how to assess the needs of future Exchange users, and describes how to evaluate the resources of the current environment for the new messaging system. Chapter 6, “Planning for Development,” discusses how to plan specific elements of your Exchange organization based on those assessments. Exchange Server is a complex program, but with suitable preparation, implementation of the new Exchange organization becomes a much easier task.

If you are reading this book from start to finish, you might want to skim these two planning chapters and then read the rest of the book. After you have a firm understanding of how the various components in an Exchange organization work, come back and read these two chapters more carefully. In the real world, planning should always come before implementation, but it helps to understand the implementation before working on your plan.

More Info

This chapter and Chapter 6 provide an overview of planning an Exchange Server 2003 deployment that, coupled with the specific component knowledge you’ll find throughout this book, should put you well on your way to designing an effective Exchange organization. If you are upgrading or migrating from a previous version of Exchange, you’ll also be interested in Chapter 14, “Planning a Migration to Exchange Server 2003.”