Exchange 2000

I've been using Exchange for several years now in our corporate environment. We started with Exchange 4.0, moved to 5.0 then converted to 5.5. We are now in the somewhat painful process of installing active directory and upgrading to Exchange 2000.

There are many things to like about Exchange. It is a very robust, powerful, simple-to-use email system. The fact that Exchange 2000 sits on top of Active Directory means it is integrated with the corporate network. This makes it trivial to support on user desktops.

I've used many different email systems over the years. I began with the simple line oriented systems on the PDP-11 and VAX systems way back in the 1980s, struggled with the idiocies of Microsoft Mail, worked with Sendmail on Linix and FreeBSD, installed and supported the excellent Firstclass email system by Softarc, and finally managed an exchange environment for many years.

All of these email systems provide the basic functionality required - they deliver a message from place to place. They are all more-or-less stable and each performs well. 

What I've discovered over the years is a the simple fact that email has become more and more critical. When I began, email was simply a nice way for geeks to communicate. It moved to the realm of "fun" with the advent of AOL and CompuServe, until today it is so essential that my phone will start ringing with 60 seconds of an email server crash.

Thus, perhaps the biggest criteria is robustness, followed by performance (speed) followed by connectively - the ability to connect to differing email systems. Just about everything else is bells and whistles (including calendaring, task management and so on).

We chose Exchange 2000 because (a) our company can easily be called a "Microsoft shop". Our servers and workstations all run Windows NT 4.0 (upgrading to 2000 and XP), our users depend upon Office 2000 and we use Microsoft Project and Visio on a daily basis. In that kind of environment, Exchange is an obvious and easy choice.

Exchange 2000 is managed from two places: Active Directory Users and Computers and the Exchange System Manager. You must use both programs (as well as the other Active directory programs to define routes and such) heavily to control exchange.

It's critical to spend as much time as necessary planning your active directory and exchange rollout. Do not skimp on this planning phase (described fully in the Microsoft documentation) as many installation options become difficult, if not impossible, to modify after active directory is installed.

Active Directory Users and Computers defines the, well, users and Computers for exchange.

Exchange System Manager is used to control all of the exchange extensions and functions that are not natively part of active directory.