Defining Administrative Needs

Your last step in the assessment stage of the planning process is to determine how administration will be handled. In versions of Exchange Server prior to Exchange 2000 Server, Exchange administration was mostly separate from other forms of network management. With the introduction of Exchange 2000 Server came extensive integration with Active Directory and that continues in Exchange Server 2003; Windows and Exchange administrators must learn to get along.

In a small organization, one or two administrators will likely be able to handle administration for both Active Directory 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 share Active Directory, it usually makes sense to let one person or group manage Active Directory users and their Exchange mailboxes (and usually other recipients, as well). 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 separates routing and administrative topologies. Servers can be grouped in administrative groups for permissions 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 Designating a separate person or group to manage public folders and public folder replication is often useful. You might even want to designate a person to manage each distinct public folder tree. You can often leave basic administrative tasks on public folders up to expert users or to the people that manage the information stored in them.