Defining Administrative Needs

[Previous] [Next]

Your last step in the assessment stage of the planning process is to determine how administration will be handled. In previous versions of Exchange Server, Exchange administration was mostly separate from other forms of network management. Now that Exchange 2000 Server makes extensive use of the Windows 2000 Active Directory, Windows and Exchange administrators must learn to get along.

In a small organization, it is likely that one or two administrators will be able to handle administration for both the Windows network and the Exchange organization. Planning the administration of larger networks requires a bit more thought. Here are a few factors to consider:

• User management Since Exchange and Windows now share Active Directory, it usually makes sense to let one person or group manage both Windows 2000 users and their Exchange mailboxes. Because the same interface is used to manage both, little extra training is required.
• Routing You will likely need one person or group to be responsible for managing routing in your organization. The administrative model in Exchange now separates routing and administrative topologies. Servers can be grouped in administrative groups for permission management and applying system policies, but they can belong to routing groups that span administrative groups for message routing. Responsibilities of this group include defining and maintaining routing and administrative groups, building and maintaining connectors between routing groups and to foreign systems, applying user and system policies, and managing permissions. You can think of this group as your core Exchange administrative unit.
• Public folders It is often useful to designate a separate person or group to manage public folders and public folder replication. You may even want to designate a person to manage each distinct public folder tree. Since public folders take on an even greater significance in Exchange 2000 Server than in previous versions, their management can be quite a complex task.
• Collaboration If you plan to provide real-time collaboration services, such as chat, conferencing, or instant messaging, in your organization, you may want to designate a separate administrative group to oversee the management of these services.