Chapter 6: Planning for Development

Overview

In Chapter 5, “Assessing Needs,” you learned how to assess the needs of your users and how to take stock of your current network situation. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to put that information to use.

We divide the task of planning a Microsoft Exchange organization into three distinct subtasks: designing the overall Exchange organization, planning the location of Exchange routing groups, and placing individual Exchange servers in those groups to optimize the messaging system. This approach will provide you with a logical placement of resources developed with users’ needs in mind.

Beginning at the organizational level, you’ll establish organization-wide naming conventions, determine the number of routing groups you’ll need and the boundaries of those groups, and plan how to link those groups. Next, at the routing group level, you’ll plan the services that the group must provide. You’ll also plan public folders and gateways. Finally, at the server level, you’ll determine the functions each server will perform and plan the server hardware to accommodate those functions.