Chapter 5. Designing an Enterprise Exchange Server 2003 Environment

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Designing for Small Organizations ”Company123

• Designing for Midsize Organizations ”OrganizationY

• Designing for Large Organizations ”CompanyABC

• Designing Active Directory for Exchange Server 2003

• Determining Hardware and Software Components

• Designing Exchange Infrastructure

• Integrating Client Access into Exchange Server 2003 Design

• Summarizing Design Examples

• Best Practices

Exchange Server 2003 was designed to accommodate the needs of multiple organizations, from the small Mom-and-Pop businesses to large multinational corporations. In addition to the scalability features present in previous versions of Exchange, Exchange Server 2003 offers more opportunities to scale the back-end server environment to the specific needs of any group .

This chapter addresses specific design guidelines for organizations of various sizes. Throughout the chapter, specific examples of small, medium, and large organizations are presented and general recommendations are made. This chapter assumes a base knowledge of design components that can be obtained by reading Chapter 4, "Exchange Server 2003 Design Concepts."

In this chapter, sample companies have been chosen to illustrate how Exchange Server 2003's design principles can be applied to organizations of varying sizes. Each major section of the chapter details the best practice design decisions taken by each of these organizations, to more effectively illustrate the common approaches to Exchange Server 2003 design. The end of the chapter summarizes the design decisions taken by each organization.