This chapter focuses on the planning, prototype testing, migration, and deployment overview for a Microsoft Exchange 2003 implementation. The following are best practices from this chapter:
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An upgrade to Exchange 2003 should follow a process that keeps the project on schedule. Set up such a process with a four-phase approach, including initiation, planning, testing, and implementation.
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Documentation is important to keep track of plans, procedures, and schedules. Create some of the documentation that could be expected for an upgrade project, including a statement of work document, a design document, a project schedule, and a migration document.
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Key to the initiation phase is the definition of the scope of work. Create such a definition, identifying the key goals of the project.
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Make sure that the goals of the project are not just IT goals, but also include goals and objectives of the organization and business units of the organization. This ensures that business needs are tied to the migration initiative, which can later be quantified to determine cost savings or tangible business process improvements.
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Set milestones in a project that can ensure that key steps are being achieved and the project is progressing at an acceptable rate. Review any drastic variation in attaining milestone tasks and timelines to determine whether the project should be modified or changed, or the plans reviewed.
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Allocate skilled or qualified resources that can help the organization to better achieve technical success and keep it on schedule. Failure to include qualified personnel can have a drastic impact on the overall success of the project.
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Identify risks and assumptions in a project to provide the project manager the ability to assess situations and proactive work and avoid actions that might cause project failures.
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Plan the design around what is best for the organization, and then create the migration process to take into account the existing configuration of the systems within the organization. Although understanding the existing environment is important to the success of the project, an implementation or migration project should not predetermine the actions of the organization based on the existing enterprise configuration.
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Ensure that key stakeholders are involved in the ultimate design of the Exchange 2003 implementation. Without stakeholder agreement on the design, the project might not be completed and approved.
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Document decisions made in the collaborative design sessions as well as in the migration planning process to ensure that key decisions are agreed upon and accepted by the participants of the process. Anyone with questions on the decisions can ask for clarification before the project begins rather than stopping the project midstream.
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Test assumptions and validate procedures in the prototype phase. Rather than learning for the first time in a production environment that a migration will fail because an Exchange database is corrupt or has inconsistencies, the entire process can be tested in a lab environment without impacting users.
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Test the process in a live production environment with a limited number of users in the prototype phase. Although key executives (such as the CIO, or IT Director) want to be part of the initial pilot phase, it is usually not recommended to take such high-visibility users in the first phase. The pilot phase should be with users that will accept an incident of lost email or inability to send or receive messages for a couple days while problems are worked out. In many cases, a pre-pilot phase could include the more tolerant users, with a formal pilot phase including insistent executives of the organization.
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Migrate, implement, or upgrade after all testing has been validated . The production process should be exactly that, a process that methodically follows procedures to implement or migrate mailboxes into the Exchange 2003 environment.
