Planning Routing Groups

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After you've established the number of routing groups your organization will contain and determined how those groups will be linked, you're ready to design the groups themselves. Several elements go into a good routing group design. You need to establish a public folder strategy, and you also need to plan the services, such as foreign gateways, that your users will need. You will base many of these determinations on the assessment of user needs described in Chapter 5.

Designing Your Routing Groups

A good portion of the work of designing an Exchange routing group involves planning the servers that will be members of that group. Planning the Exchange servers themselves is the topic of a later section of this chapter. The following are a few guidelines for deciding how to distribute the services among the servers in a routing group:

• If your goal is to isolate messaging traffic from other network traffic, put users and their home servers on the same network segment in a workgroup configuration. It is important to have high-bandwidth connections between mail clients and servers for the best performance.
• If your goal is to use a hierarchical physical network structure, in order to use its inherent security by grouping servers together, put servers on intermediate network segments that route traffic to the network backbone, and route traffic to the geographically located workgroup segments.
• Put the mailboxes for all users in a workgroup on the same server. Users tend to send the most mail to other users in their own workgroup. Keeping all of the mailboxes on the same server means lighter network traffic and lower consumption of server disk space.
• When possible, create duplicate services on multiple servers to provide fault tolerance. Always place Exchange servers on machines that have fault-tolerant hardware.

Planning Public Folders

Public folders in Exchange 2000 Server can be put to several uses, including as discussion forums, as public collections of documents, and even as the basis for custom applications. Exchange 2000 Server allows you to configure multiple public folder trees, each of which can contain any number of public folders. Folders created in the root level of a public folder tree are referred to as top-level folders. When a user creates a top-level folder, it is placed on that user's home server. When a user creates a lower-level folder, it is placed on the same server as the folder in which it is created. The contents of a public folder can be stored on a single server, or they can be replicated to other servers in the routing group and organization. Chapter 10 discusses the creation, storage, and replication of public folders in detail. A few aspects of public folders are pertinent to routing group planning:

• Decide how many different public folder trees you want to maintain. Each department could manage its own tree, or you could have one companywide tree.
• Decide whether to distribute public folders on multiple servers throughout your routing group or to maintain them all on a single server.
• Decide whether to dedicate certain servers to public folders by having them contain only public folder stores or to have servers that contain both public folders in public folder stores and private folders such as mailboxes in mailbox stores.
• Determine which users will be using public folders for collaborative applications and whether those applications will require other services or special security.
• If users in remote routing groups need to access public folders in a local routing group, decide whether or not to replicate the contents to a server in the remote routing group to keep intergroup network traffic down.
• Consider which users should be allowed to create top-level folders in a public folder tree. Limiting the number of users who can create top-level folders allows you to control both the servers on which public folders are created and the basic organization of the public folder hierarchy.
• When naming public folders, you have a bit more license than with the names of other recipients. Public folder names can be up to 256 characters. However, when you name your folders, keep in mind that only a small portion of the name will actually display in your users' client software, and very long names could become a real hassle. Also, some users may occasionally need to type in the name of a public folder, and smaller names will be greatly appreciated.

Planning Gateways

Any server can be configured with a connector to a foreign system. All other servers in the organization will then be able to route messages over that gateway. When possible, you want to create a foreign messaging connector on the server that maintains the actual physical connection to the foreign system. Also, if one group of users makes primary use of a foreign connection, consider placing those users on the server on which the connector is installed.