Case Scenario Exercise

You are an Exchange Server systems consultant that has been contracted by Contoso, Ltd. to recommend an Exchange Server 2003 design for their company. Contoso has been in business since 1921 and over the years has grown into a global company. The company, headquartered in Dallas, currently has additional U.S. offices in Boston, St. Louis, Omaha, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tampa. The company also has international offices in Tokyo, Seoul, Berlin, London, Mexico City, Lima, and Jakarta. Despite such an international presence and a forward-thinking business and manufacturing model, Contoso has been very slow to embrace technology and especially slow in developing an Internet presence. To date, the company has no Web site, though one is currently in development. The e-mail system, which is your concern, is an archaic menu-driven system that allows internal users to e-mail each other but has no Internet capabilities. Due to the changing economic climate and the need to operate more efficiently, Contoso is undergoing a significant infrastructure and process redesign, and a different consulting team from your firm has recently implemented Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory throughout the company.

Active Directory is laid out as a single forest with domains contoso.com (USA), europe.contoso.com, asia.contoso.com, and sa.contoso.com. Each location is configured as its own Active Directory site, and organizational units (OUs) are used to create the necessary administrative divisions for the company's decentralized administrative model (each site manages its own resources). The exception is the Enterprise Admins group, which consists of a handful of team members at the company's Dallas headquarters. This group oversees the Active Directory infrastructure, while the branch office administrators handle the day-to-day administration of their OUs. Exchange Server 2003 has been installed on one server in each domain to date.

• Requirement 1 You have been asked to deploy Exchange Server 2003 in a way that is consistent with the Active Directory administration model. You will need to plan an administrative and routing group topology to reflect the mixed centralized and decentralized model required by Contoso. The model needs to meet the following requirements:

  • Dallas's Enterprise Admins group must be able to administer everything.

  • Branch locations should be able to administer their Exchange servers on a day-to-day basis, including managing policies and configuring all server-specific options.

  • Omaha does not have its own full-time IT staff, so it needs to be managed by the St. Louis office. As a result, its server should be in the St. Louis administrative group.

• Requirement 2 Because Contoso is installing Exchange Server 2003 for the first time, there is little in-house expertise in administering it. The IT director has identified seven systems administrators that will receive training and will perform various roles in the administration of Exchange. Two of the administrators will handle the modification of permissions, as necessary. Furthermore, the director wants the helpdesk managers in the network operations center to be able to view key Exchange Server 2003 data such as mail queues as part of handling calls from users. All administration will take place at the organization level. You need to delegate control as appropriate.

• Requirement 3 As part of Contoso's recent network infrastructure overhaul, all of the desktop computers have been replaced with new computers running Windows XP Professional and updated to SP2. Each of the seven administrators has a laptop running Windows 2000 Professional SP4. The IT director wants each of the Exchange Server 2003 administrators to be able to administer the Exchange organization from their own workstations, with the permissions appropriate to their administrative role.

Requirement 1

This requirement asks you to define an administrative model that will work for Contoso's Exchange organization.

1. Describe an appropriate administrative group structure for Contoso's Exchange organization given their requirements.

2. In a default Exchange Server 2003 organization, could you have Omaha's servers placed in the St. Louis administrative group?

Requirement 2

The second requirement involves delegating authority to the personnel who will be administering Exchange Server 2003.

1. Describe the type of administrative model that is best suited for Contoso, based on its organizational needs. Explain why it is the best choice.

2. How would you accommodate the needs of the help desk managers to be able to run the Exchange System Manager console to view message queue information while not allowing them to make changes or attempt to alter the message queues (such as forcing a delivery retry)?

3. Based on the information in the scenario, design a delegation of authority plan that would be the easiest to administer and update on a long-term basis, allow delegation of appropriate levels of permissions to different IT personnel, and meet the administrative model needs of Contoso.

Requirement 3

For this requirement, you need to ensure that all administrators can access Exchange System Manager from their own computers without having to use the server console itself.

1. Prior to installing Microsoft Exchange System Management Tools on the helpdesk managers' computers running Windows XP Professional SP2, which of the following components need to be installed on the computers? (Choose all that apply.)

   1. IIS

   2. Windows Server 2003 AdminPack

   3. WWW service

   4. IIS Manager

   5. SMTP service

2. Contoso's server environment is entirely Windows Server 2003–based, and the company never ran a prior server version of Windows (Windows Server 2003 replaced Novell NetWare 3.12). Given the nature of Contoso's migration to Windows Server 2003, identify a problem that must be addressed prior to installing Microsoft Exchange System Management Tools on the administrators' laptop computers running Windows 2000 Professional SP3.