Case Scenario Exercise

Wide World Importers is a company that operates under different names in different countries. In addition to the wideworldimporters.com domain name, they also operate under contoso.com, fabrikam.com, adatum.com, and litwareinc.com.

The consortium of companies has been operating in a Windows NT 4 domain environment running Exchange Server 5.5 SP4. Each company has its own domain, with all domains trusting the wideworldimporters.com domain for the parent company. The present arrangement has led to a lot of duplication of administrative effort, and the support costs of maintaining five distinct Windows NT domains and Exchange organizations have increased to unacceptable levels. As a result, the decision has been made to migrate to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory, and to migrate from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003. You have been hired as a consultant in order to facilitate the entire project.

• Requirement 1 Management has determined that by reducing the duplication of resources and administrative effort, it will reduce the support costs for the organization. One of your key responsibilities is to ensure that the network administrators for wideworldimporters.com can administer all of the domains effectively without a network of complex trust relationships in place. Furthermore, they want all the companies to share a common global address list rather than having five separate lists.

• Requirement 2 Some of the companies that comprise Wide World Importers are located in countries where there are toll charges for accessing the Internet. So, even though there are VPN connections between company locations, it is important to minimize the usage of the WAN connections for non-user-generated network traffic during business hours, when toll charges are the highest.

Requirement 1

The first requirement involves planning the Active Directory infrastructure to support the company's needs.

1. Describe the forest and domain infrastructure you would recommend that would result in the most efficient level of administration.

2. Explain how the number of Active Directory forests would affect the deployment of Exchange Server 2003.

Requirement 2

The second requirement involves minimizing the usage of toll-based WAN connections during business hours.

1. Describe a feature of Active Directory that you can use to organize resources in a way that will allow you to minimize usage of WAN bandwidth for non-user-generated network traffic during business hours.

2. How would the use of sites in this situation affect the placement of global catalog servers?