Exchange 2000 Release Forces IT to Begin Planning - Microsoft Corp - Product Support

ENT, Sept 20, 2000 by Scott Bekker, Stephen Swoyer

Exchange 2000 rollouts are going to be tricky. Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) will release Exchange 2000 this month, and it is the first application designed by Microsoft to leverage its Active Directory technology in Windows 2000.

Microsoft program manager Matthias Leibmann made it clear during a presentation at the MCP Tech/Mentor conference in San Francisco earlier this month that Exchange 2000 deployments will require Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

"The No. 1 factor to a successful Exchange 2000 deployment is a successful Windows 2000 deployment," Leibmann said.

All Exchange 2000 information about users, mailboxes, servers, sites, and custom recipients gets stored in Windows 2000's Active Directory. The Exchange-specific directory that existed up through Exchange 5.5 is gone. Microsoft will provide a tool called Active Directory Connector to migrate existing Exchange data to Active Directory.

Exchange 2000's reliance on Active Directory will probably make the new messaging server's adoption slow since few Active Directory rollouts have taken place. But it also makes Exchange 2000 planning a process that should be started almost immediately for organizations that expect to eventually move to it.

The design choice to drop Exchange's directory in favor of Active Directory offers a number of benefits. Windows 2000 users automatically become mail recipients. Unified administration of objects allows an administrator to manage users' network attributes and mailbox data in one place with one set of tools. Delegation wizards allow an IT administrator to give a business unit leader limited administrative rights to create new users in a department with both network passwords and e-mail accounts. Security groups in Windows 2000 can be automatically used as Exchange 2000 distribution lists.

The entire security infrastructure introduced with Windows 2000 also gets passed to Exchange 2000. This means administrators use a single permissions model for Windows 2000 resources and Exchange 2000 objects, such as Public Folders. An increased level of granularity is possible with the new versions as well, allowing Access Control List permissions to be set for a specific mail message.

"It leads down the path of lower TCO. The nice thing with the Active Directory is that you can manage all of your user resources from that single directory," says Christopher Baker, product manager for Exchange Server 2000 at Microsoft. "You can administer everything from your network to Windows 2000 systems to your Exchange public folders, mailboxes."

In addition to the Active Directory integration, Exchange Server 2000 also boasts a revamped conferencing feature based on Microsoft's instant messaging chat client, rather than on the company's not-quite-standard implementation of the Internet Relay Chat protocol, which was leveraged in Exchange 5.5's conferencing server.

Exchange Server 2000 also provides a unified messaging facility; a substantially overhauled Outlook Web Access interface that is said to bring the experience of using Outlook through a Web browser "a lot closer" to that of using the full-fledged Outlook client itself; and a Web storage system that will let developers more easily write applications for Exchange.

The Notes/Domino messaging and collaboration platform from IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com) subsidiary Lotus Development Corp. (www.lotus.com) has for some time featured a robust integrated database environment that has spurred the development of Domino-centric applications among both ISVs and among IT organizations. Baker expects that the Web storage system will accomplish much the same thing for Exchange Server 2000.

"Customers are going to take a long look at the fact that they can build custom apps that are going to make their teams more productive, and we've got a lot of customers that are building applications on the Web storage system," Baker says.

The benefits, however, do come with costs, mostly in the form of increased complexity for messaging administrators and network administrators in setting up Exchange 2000. The Active Directory schema must be extended for Exchange 2000. New Exchange 2000 objects are added to the Active Directory, meaning anything added to Exchange adds to Global Catalog replication traffic on the network.

There are other networking considerations for Exchange 2000 administrators. Exchange 2000 uses Windows 2000 Domain Controllers for all authentication. Global Catalog servers will be used for all message routing. Exchange 2000 uses Windows 2000 Sites to determine what Domain Controllers and Global Catalog servers to hit.

To ensure the smooth handling of all these issues, the "disconnect between messaging and network people" has to be overcome, Leibmann said at the conference. In environments where a migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000 is expected to coincide with or follow a migration to Windows 2000 and Active Directory, the messaging administrator must be closely involved in the network planning process.