Top Exchange Design Considerations

When I'm creating or reviewing a company's Exchange Server design, I try to make sure that the plan adheres to four key architectural principles: simplicity, integration, cost, and efficiency. Simplicity means ensuring that the design contains everything your business needs and nothing that it doesn't. Integration means finding a compromise between the enterprise view and the point view. Cost means that the design takes into consideration the total cost of ownership (TCO) over time. And efficiency means that the finished design will make your life easier. I've found 10 steps that are invaluable in creating a design that helps meet those four requirements. Here are the first four.

#1: Document the Business Expectations
Understanding and documenting your business's messaging requirements is the first task on your plate. Notice that I don't say deciding these requirements. That's because decisions such as mailbox size, retention, recovery, and maintenance windows are best made by the business units that comprise your company. This isn't to say that the IT department doesn't have a say in those decisions, but your primary role should be to explain your messaging technologies' advantages and disadvantages in a nonbiased manner so that the business leaders can make an informed decision. By doing so, you help increase the likelihood that your Exchange architecture will be well aligned with your company's overall business objectives. Consider mailbox-recovery time. Your company's business leaders might decide that one group of users requires an extremely fast recovery time, whereas other users can live with longer recovery times. Knowing this might affect your design and perhaps would lead you to install one mailbox-server configuration for the first set of users and another mailbox-server configuration for the remaining users (depending on their classification). . . .