Summary

 <  Day Day Up  >  

Exchange used to mean email and scheduling to the average user , but it has grown to become a critical business communications and collaboration tool. Email must be available at any hour of the day, and must be protected from viruses and spam. Calendars must be accessible to co-workers for scheduling meetings, or for company resources ”such as conference rooms ”to be allocated. Public folders enable company information to be shared on an as-needed basis and are replacing intranets in many organizations. The new productivity tools in Outlook 2003 make it an even more valuable tool for the average user.

The Outlook client has become an invaluable filing cabinet for the average user and a way of listening to voicemails, reading faxes, and keeping up on industry news. More "road warriors" can be fully functional because of their ability to access the network remotely, but email and scheduling access are major requirements. Any change to the Exchange messaging environment has an impact on every user on the network, and many organizations worry more about an Exchange upgrade than an NOS.

With these added features comes complexity in how the Exchange environment is configured and how it integrates with the network as a whole. An organization can have multiple Exchange Mail servers, front-end servers to provide OWA access, bridgehead servers to connect sites, and conferencing and mobile information servers.

Exchange Server 2003 was designed to be very flexible in how it can be integrated with the existing messaging environment. Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003 can coexist, and Exchange Server 2003 can be installed on Windows 2000 Server (with some limitations) or Windows Server 2003. This flexibility requires a phased implementation that starts with creating a scope for the project (what's in, what's out), understanding the goals from a business standpoint and a technology standpoint, and creating a more detailed Statement of work document. As the process moves forward, time should be spent on discovery of the existing environment and collaborative design sessions to agree on what the end result of the migration will be. After the design is documented and agreed on by the company executives and project stakeholders, a roadmap needs to be created to detail how to get from point A to point Z. A project schedule in the form of a Gantt chart paints the high-level picture, and a Migration document tells the details of the resources required, the specifics of the tasks to be performed, and the risks involved.

After all this documentation, lab testing is essential to prove the conceptual design and train the project team on the new technologies and prepare any documents needed for the migration. Assuming no show-stoppers are encountered in the testing process, Exchange Server 2003 can be introduced to the production network on a pilot basis, with a handful of users with different needs. When this process is complete and any snags are resolved, the full migration can be performed, with a high level of confidence that no major problems will be encountered . Upon completion of the migration, maintenance procedures should be created to ensure that the new messaging ecosystem is optimized and tuned .

The process can be summarized by saying that a thorough understanding of the needs of the organization, an assessment of the current environment, and a structure design and testing process yield more successful results.

 <  Day Day Up  >  


Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0672328070
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 393
Authors: Rand Morimoto

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net