Another acre of rain forest is gone and it's now menacing you from the corner of your desk, reincarnated as the user manuals Microsoft ships with Exchange. OK, maybe you have the CD-ROM version of the manuals instead. Although you don't have all those dead trees on your conscience, the problem is the same: how to wade through all those words and get a major new mail system up and running to your satisfaction and to the satisfaction of every other mail user in your organization.
How will my extra quarter-acre of paper help? This isn't called a Survival Guide for nothing!
Exchange is a client/server mail system. There are two major components in this system. The first component, visible to mail users, is the mailbox interface used on the desktop. This is the Exchange client. The second component, called the Exchange server, works in the background to send, receive, store messages, and perform other system-wide tasks.
The official name for this product is "Microsoft Exchange Server." Of course, this includes the client and server pieces along with many other supporting components. From here on, I use "client" or "server" to refer to those components specifically. Otherwise, the mail system in its entirety is simply "Exchange."
In order to keep this guide a manageable size, the authors made a few assumptions about you, your organization, and your goals. This is necessary because Exchange is appropriate for a wide range of businesses. It is designed to scale from small, single-server sites (50 or so users) all the way up to multiserver, multisite giants (10,000+ users). One reason that the Exchange user manuals are huge is that they have to cover the full range of possibilities. The material dealing with large-scale systems is naturally long and complex.
The first assumption is that your system requirements are somewhat more modest than the average multinational conglomerate. This means that although you might have up to 1,000 users, a few hundred are more likely. This also means that although you might have multiple servers or even multiple sites, your needs are focused on a primary server and a single site. This guide focuses on connecting servers and sites together using common resources like dial-up Internet connections. It leaves the details of dedicated T1 router connections, ATM protocols, and the like to a more ambitious soul.
Figure 1.1 shows these sizing assumptions graphically. Admittedly, it's fuzzy and there are variables that are ignored for now, but this guide will best fit your needs if you fall more in the lower-left corner rather than the extremes.
Figure 1.1. The range of possible Exchange installations and the subset that is the primary focus of the Microsoft Exchange System Administrator's Survival Guide.
Next, this guide assumes that you are the one who will plan, install, configure, and administer Exchange hands-on. This guerrilla approach is often taken by smaller organizations—you are in good company. You don't actually have to wear all these hats, but you should be the person responsible for understanding the scope and managing the overall implementation.
Finally, the guide assumes that you might be replacing an existing, small-scale, PC-based messaging system like Microsoft Mail or Lotus cc:Mail. Although Exchange is designed to replace large-scale, mini- and mainframe-based systems, the issues involved in managing the transition are out of scope here.
If you are responsible for implementing a large multiserver, multisite system intended to serve thousands of users, this guide is a good starting point for understanding the issues involved, but you will need the services of an experienced consulting company. You can certainly use this guide for routine administration and maintenance issues after Exchange is installed. And, if you want to test Exchange at a smaller site before you bet the corporate farm, this is a great way to start. Hey! Buy that second copy now!
The goal of this guide is to make Exchange an integral part of your organization's communication system with the minimum amount of turmoil, confusion, and disruption. To do this, this guide focuses on essential information and continues to make some careful assumptions about your goals and needs. Along the way, it also helps you avoid the pitfalls and separate the promises made about Exchange from the reality.
This guide is organized in sections that reflect the fundamental steps that you must follow to be successful.
To begin, you need a big-picture understanding of how the various parts of a mail system work together to make the whole. Although it's likely that you know a lot of the terms and concepts already, Exchange is based on a client/server architecture. This is a new development for PC-based mail systems. It is important to understand how this new architecture applies to Exchange and the parts and pieces it includes. Along with this, you need to understand what is expected of you as planner, installer, and administrator as you move forward to roll out the new mail system.
Exchange requires planning on several levels. First, you need to plan the physical implementation. Exchange has significant hardware and software requirements. You need to assess what you have and what you might need to get the Exchange server up and running and connected to your organization's local area network. With remote users, multiple sites, connections to the Internet or other mail systems, physical planning includes assessing wide area networking hardware, connections, protocols, bandwidth, and traffic.
Next, you need to plan the logical organization of your mail system. This includes setting naming conventions for sites, mailbox addresses, folders, and other similar software-supplied functionality that users see and interact with. Good planning and organization here will prevent user confusion and extra administrative work later on.
Finally, you must also plan the rollout of Exchange. E-mail is a critical business resource; you must plan to manage the impact of the new mail system on your coworkers. This includes installing the Exchange client on individual desktop PCs, education, and training. If you are replacing an existing mail system, you need a clear plan to minimize disruption during the transition.
I can practically hear your sighs at this point, but planning is a must! It is the single most important thing you can do to ensure success.
With plans in hand, you are prepared to tackle the actual implementation of Exchange. This section takes you step-by-step through installing the Exchange server software and configuring basic operations, installing and configuring Exchange client software, and connecting to other Exchange servers and to other mail systems. If your system includes multiple Exchange servers, this is where you'll be introduced to the scintillating details of directory and folder synchronization and replication.
Getting Exchange installed, running, and connected is three-quarters of the battle for success. The remainder involves keeping the system running and usable. The Exchange server includes a sophisticated administrative interface and related tools. "Sophisticated" is a polite way of saying more controls, settings, and options than you've probably ever seen in a software program. This section shows you the administrative interface, explains the key controls, and demystifies the obscure ones. It also takes you step-by-step through typical administrative chores and problems.
Beyond administration, your mail system will require routine maintenance, as well. The Exchange server and the underlying Windows NT operating system include many tools for checking the performance and overall health of your mail system. This section shows what these tools are for and how, when, and how often to use them. Along with this, you learn likely potential problems and specific steps to solve them.
Exchange is much more than e-mail. In Microsoft's big-picture view of electronic messaging, Exchange is the backbone of a collaborative information sharing, communication, and workflow system. Words such as "workflow" and "collaborative" are still pretty open-ended. Much of this is evolving and yet to be implemented, but the potential is enormous.
Imagine a future in which routine reports, forms, meeting notes, and the like move from person to person through the system without printing and shuffling paper. A future where no more trees are flattened just for the sake of exhaustive explanations of exactly how somebody spent two hundred bucks entertaining an important client in Poughkeepsie.
For now, Exchange includes utilities for designing custom forms to replace paper equivalents. Other companies are providing premade forms and the software for designing and implementing them, as well. Support for automatically controlling the flow of electronic forms (rules, routing lists, decision points, and so on), is planned for future versions of Exchange.
Although this one aspect of Exchange easily deserves its own 800-page book, the section starts by showing you how to use the tools currently provided with Exchange to design, create, and implement a usable form, step by step. You also learn the forms and tools available from third-party companies such as Delrina.
If all this seems like a lot, it is! Fight off that lurking sense of panic, and stick around for the rest of this chapter. If you can tolerate my opening metaphor once more before I ax it for good: the forest in all these trees is a well-planned, well-implemented mail system that serves the critical communications needs of your organization for years to come. The on-going Internet explosion and its nascent promises of affordable and practical global data communications make this exciting, fascinating, and vital to business success.
Avoid the urge to skip ahead to the installation chapters and barrel in! Believe me, Exchange is significantly harder to reinstall than it is to install right the first time. The sheer scope and potential impact of Exchange requires a thorough understanding of the issues and conscientious preparation and planning.
I'm not suggesting that you got the job of major mail-system administrator by throwing caution and good sense to the wind, but I do recognize that a book of this nature and size is tough to read sequentially. And these are the streamlined instructions!
I also know you are probably anxious to get started. Besides—don't tell anyone—I avoid reading these things too. In that spirit, here's the absolute minimum you have to read and do in Parts I and II of this guide before you double-click SETUP.EXE and launch into the actual installation:
Minimum Steps to Complete Before Installation
- Finish this chapter if you are interested in what Exchange does now and what Microsoft has promised it will do in the future. This is a high-level overview. The details are in Chapters 3, "Server Components," and 4, "Client Components."
- Skim Chapter 2, "Mail System Concepts," to make sure you are familiar with the general terms and ideas. If a term or idea is new, read the explanation before you continue.
- Chapters 3 and 4 are required reading.
- Skim Chapter 5, "Administrative Concepts." Again, if it's not familiar, understand it before you continue.
- Read Chapter 6, "Server Requirements." Access your hardware and software resources, gather the missing elements, and physically prepare the Exchange server computer platform.
- Skim Chapter 7, "Steps to a Successful Roll-Out." This chapter contains a comprehensive checklist. Use it as you move forward into Part III and the actual implementation steps.
- If you are replacing an existing mail system, Read Chapter 8, "Moving From Another Mail System." Note the issues and concerns for reference so that you can keep them in mind as you move ahead to the transition to Exchange.
Early in 1993, Bill Gates announced Microsoft's vision of a new way for computer users to work together, sharing information with "anyone, anywhere, anytime." In the future, he said, users would be able to automate routine business processes, eliminate paper forms, automatically negotiate meeting times and places, and collaborate on shared projects in entirely new ways.
The backbone of this system of universal information exchange, Gates said, would be Microsoft's next generation of electronic mail coupled with client-server computing and new operating systems.
These are big promises, and it has taken millions of dollars and nearly as many developer hours to fulfill a reasonable part of them. Exchange is a year or two late to market depending upon whose chronology you believe. There were two major slips in publicly announced schedules and many more minor slips for specific features. Targeted features shifted along with release dates as Microsoft started to discover just how difficult the task it had set turned out to be.
Of course, there is a great reason why Microsoft missed so many deadlines: Exchange is huge! Its scope is massive, pervasive, and ambitious. Along the way, Microsoft has had to develop and refine an operating system capable of supporting the Exchange server (Windows NT) and create an entirely new messaging architecture (Messaging Application Program Interface, or MAPI) to support the Exchange client and other mail applications.
All this has created a certain amount of confusion about what Exchange is now and what it promises to be in the future.
Microsoft has added to the confusion by using the name "Exchange" for two separate products. The first, the topic of this guide, is the Exchange Server that is part of the Microsoft BackOffice suite of products. The second is a limited version included free with Windows 95 and Windows NT. This version of Exchange can be run as a shared-file mail system (in contrast to a client-server system) and includes a reduced-feature version of the Exchange client.
The full version of Exchange has a full-featured version of the Exchange client, although either client works with the Exchange server. To round out the confusion, either client can be used with other compatible mail servers and other, third-party clients can be used with the Exchange server. The server and client features are covered in detail in Chapters 3 and 4.
Exchange is building groupware from a messaging foundation; it is a mail system first. It has a complete, well-designed interface for sending, receiving, and managing mail. There is a strong focus on integrating smoothly with legacy mail systems. In the Microsoft view, mail is the mechanism and underlying metaphor for sharing information.
In contrast, Notes began as a general-purpose application for sharing information. Mail—in the sense of text messages back and forth—is just one kind of information to share. In the Lotus view, mail is an application that can be built with Notes. Indeed, before version 4.0, the mail interface provided by Lotus (built on top of Notes) was weak and often criticized.
Although perspectives differ, there are strong parallels between Exchange and Notes. Both provide scaleable, robust infrastructure. Both provide development tools for building groupware applications. Currently, Exchange is a stronger messaging system and Notes is a stronger groupware environment. As the market for groupware expands, these differences will fade and the two products will become strongly competitive. The result will be better products for Exchange and Notes users.
The following is a brief summary of the major features and benefits that are currently part of Exchange:
Although this version of Exchange delivers a lot, there are a few features Microsoft has promised that have yet to materialize:
This chapter has given you an overview of Exchange, including some product background and history. This is enough for now; the messy details will show up in later chapters. You've also been given an overview of this guide: who it's for, how it's organized, and how to use it. Now it is time to move on to an overview of mail-system concepts. A good understanding of a mail system generally will help you better understand the specific structure and organization of Exchange.
