Validating and Optimizing Your Design


Validation means ensuring that you have a system that guarantees message delivery, integrity, and security. It also means making sure the system you designed is versatile enough to handle the range of documents, messaging formats, and applications that your organization needs. Optimization is a balancing act in which you try to build the fastest, most stable, and most reliable systems that you can while still meeting organizational requirements and keeping costs down.

Guaranteed Delivery

Guaranteed message delivery comes with reliable Windows 2003 and Exchange 2007 servers and reliable internal and external networks. To increase the likelihood of guaranteed delivery, go for as much server fault tolerance and networking redundancy as your organization can afford. Use high-quality server and networking hardware and software inside your organization; buy outside networking services from stable, experienced, and well-established providers. Monitor the health of your networks, and be prepared to fix problems quickly. During the validation phase, send messages of all kinds through all your connections, and then check to see if they arrive intact. When problems arise, use Exchange's own message-tracking tools to catch up with wayward messages, and take advantage of Exchange's network- and system-monitoring tools to discover why a message didn't get through.

Reliability is only one side of guaranteed message delivery. You also need Exchange servers that are sufficiently fast and networks that have the bandwidth to move messages quickly enough to meet maximum delivery time parameters. If you specified that all messages should be delivered to all internal users within five minutes, for example, now's the time to see if your Exchange system is capable of performing up to spec. If not, you must either increase your permissible maximum delivery times or, depending on the source of the problem, come up with speedier servers or higher-bandwidth networks.

Message Integrity

Message integrity means that messages arrive in the same form as they were transmitted. Problems with message integrity can often be traced to mismatched binary message-part encoding and decoding. For example, a binary attachment to a message bound for the Internet is UUencoded by the sender, while the receiver expects MIME encoding. As you'll see later, there are lots of ways to set encoding parameters in Exchange to help avoid problems such as this.

Message Security

RSA encryption and public keys both work within a single Exchange organization and can be enabled to work across Exchange organizations. Exchange Server 2007 uses a number of Windows 2003-based security features to significantly enhance message security. For messages destined for foreign electronic messaging systems, Exchange Server implements a set of encryption and authentication standards: NTLM encryption, TLS encryption, SASL clear-text authentication, and Secure MIME. (More on these topics comes in Chapter 20, "Securing Exchange Server.")

You can try to validate message security on your own or with the help of a certified electronic data processing auditor. If security is important to your organization, we strongly recommend the latter.

System Versatility

Exchange's internal message formatting, along with formatting available for Internet-bound mail, means that you are able to send documents of almost any type containing virtually anything from text to last night's Letterman show. But be sure to validate that everything you need is there and works.

Exchange Server is a very popular product, so plenty of Exchange-based applications are already available from third-party vendors; many more are in development. Keep your eyes open for the latest "killer" Exchange apps.

Optimization

When you've done everything to ensure guaranteed message delivery, message integrity, and security as well as system versatility, it's time for optimization. You optimize your design by checking out alternatives that might help improve your Exchange system.

Optimization can also focus on reducing costs without compromising the quality of your system. For example, you might want to come up with lower-cost options for connecting Exchange routing groups or for realizing network redundancy.




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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