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You may have a considerable investment in your MS Exchange 5.5 organization that you want to protect, and/or migrate to the new MS Exchange 2000 infrastructure.  If you do, there are several questions that need to be answered in order to understand the best approach to get your organization to an MS Exchange 2000 level. The key areas of concern are listed as well as the questions that you should be asking yourself.

 

• Network topology - Considering that your network is already in place to support the MS Windows NT 4.0 and MS Exchange 5.5 infrastructure, is your network at a level in which you can support MS Active Directory and MS Exchange 2000?  Some of the best practices to apply to discovering whether or not your network can support not only the legacy infrastructure.
   

  • Try to utilize wherever you are able 512Kbps or higher, but if you must use a lower speed, do not go below 256Kbps or you will start to see system degradation in both your AD (Active Directory) and MS Exchange 2000 infrastructures.  A good consultant would look at the relationship between your NT 4.0 environment (Trusts, domain structures and placements) along with your network connectivity sets to ensure the placement of co-existent equipment is utilizing the fullest of the network capacity without impact to the functionality of the messaging infrastructure.
     

  • How much of that network pipe is open for business?  One of the largest areas forgotten when a plan is put into place to migrate from the legacy MS infrastructure to AD and Exchange 2000 is how saturated is the network pipe.  If there is lets say SNA traffic riding the same network pipe as your NT and messaging architecture, will moving to AD and Exchange 2000 heavily impact your network and the other applications.
     

  A helpful guide can be found on the Microsoft website which will help you analyze your network infrastructure, and help you make the determination whether your first stop to migrating to Exchange 2000 is going to be your Network infrastructure.
   

• External Connectivity - Your company may have communications outside of the internal network that pass mail to other company e-mail network systems or through the internet.  When interacting with other types of systems, you must first find out if the Microsoft Exchange 2000 software will support those legacy gateways and/or systems.  Does your company communicate through SNADS gateway for example?  This particular gateway is currently not support through the MS Exchange 2000 software system, and hence you would have to introduce additional complexity in order to allow this delivery mechanism to communicate to MS Exchange 2000.
   

  • SNADS ( System Network Architecture Distribution Services) and PROFS (Professional Office System) e-mail based systems which reside on mini and mainframe computers are not natively supported through MS Exchange 2000.  If you have these gateways and/or connectors in your legacy Exchange 5.5 infrastructure you will either have to consider a "mixed" mode migration path for your infrastructure or an InterOrg connection between the Exchange 5.5 housing these gateways, with the MS Exchange 2000 infrastructure.
     

  • Microsoft Mail, Lotus cc:Mail, Lotus Domino/Notes, and Novell Groupwise have native connectors that can be installed within MS Exchange 2000.  These traditionally were setup as X.400 and/or SMTP connections in Legacy 5.5, but now have corresponding message connectors in Exchange 2000.  Note as always when introducing disparate e-mail infrastructures, you are subjected to take some risk.  The risk lies into the performance on the network, the risk of the number of systems a particular message and/or replication event must traverse point to point, and potential disconnection points as the two systems try to co-exist with each other.
     

  There are a lot of companies who still today operate and maintain many disparate e-mail infrastructures, especially now with the market trends as they are causing mergers and acquisitions to grow.  Analyze your Messaging infrastructure from head to toe, understand how each component interacts with the other, and then relate it to what you found on your network.  An experienced consultant would understand these relationships, how they relate and interact with each other, then help guide you to the end messaging result with Microsoft Exchange 2000.  Potentially at this time, you would consider migrating all the different systems into one, basically inflicting the pain on your users at one time.

  
   

• Server Equipment - Let's face it, how many companies today can't afford to  upgrade their old equipment to that which can support Active Directory and the Microsoft 2000 family of products.  But if your seriously considering moving to MS Windows 2000, Active Directory, and MS Exchange 2000, you will need to take a hard look at those production systems and see what fits the hardware requirements lists.  Take a hard look at your leases, if that is how you procure equipment, and plan your upgrade path around those terms to reduce the cost and impact to your users and infrastructure.
   

  • The bare minimums that is acceptable for a small corporation mail server is a single Pentium II 300 MHz processor with 256 MB or RAM and 4GB of hard disk space.  Many corporations today would not fit this "minimum" configuration and require either a dual or quad processor, 3GB or greater of RAM, and double to triple the amount of hard disk space.  Why you may ask, well in order to reduce the cost of owning the servers and the disk space, maintenance costs, and staffing, corporations today are moving to larger storage solutions, such as a NAS (Network Attached storage) or SAN (Storage Area Network) which can hold large banks of disk, cutting the cost of multiple pieces of equipment to house larger amounts of users down.
     

  • Who is managing this equipment?  Is a central or decentralized team?  It's a good time to look at your operational support model when planning for the migration to AD and MS Exchange 2000.  Routing groups, which are a collection of Microsoft Exchange servers, within a stable and reliable network infrastructure, are tied to Administrative Groups ( a collection of Active Directory objects managed as a group).  Depending on whether your operational model is centralized or de-centralized will depend how you plan and implement the MS Exchange server placement.  A MS Exchange consultant would review your Operational model, map it to the AD and MS Exchange infrastructure and provide recommendations to better met the needs of your organization.