Getting your Exchange 2007 project approved…
So this is the last of these blogs for the moment. This is the list of blogs that I wrote on the subject:
- Part 1 (Fewer Servers supporting More Mailboxes)
- Part 2 (Make your backups more cost effective…)
- Part 3 (Storage)
- Part 4 (Big Mailboxes)
- Part 5 (the Edge)
- Part 6 (A few last ideas…)
Let me know if any of the above was useful.
..and just to highlight the point…
“For the deployment of Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft IT defined the following key objectives:
- Increase employee productivity This included increasing mailbox quotas by as much as 1,000 percent, from 200 MB to 500 MB and 2 GB, and deploying new productivity features available in Exchange Server 2007, such as unified messaging, which enables users to receive all messages in their mailboxes, including e-mail, voice mail, and fax messages. In addition to desktop and portable clients, users can use standard telephones to access these messages. Increasing employee productivity also included deploying Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 as the primary messaging client so users can benefit from new and advanced information management features such as instant search, managed folders, and more.
- Increase operational efficiency This included reducing administrative overhead associated with maintaining the messaging environment through features that are directly available in Exchange Server 2007, such as Exchange Management Shell. Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Exchange Management Shell enables Microsoft IT to create custom scripts that facilitate mundane deployment tasks, such as applying a consistent set of configuration settings per server role across multiple servers.
- Decrease security risks This included deploying Edge Transport servers and Forefront Security for Exchange Server in the perimeter network to increase security and messaging protection and to reduce the number of legitimate messages incorrectly identified as spam (false positives). This also included encrypting all internal server-to-server message traffic using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to help protect confidentiality for messages in transit.
- Decrease costs This included redesigning server architectures and backup solutions for high availability to meet challenging SLAs. In redesigning server architectures, Microsoft IT heavily focused on incorporating the features directly available in Exchange Server 2007, replacing expensive SAN storage with a more cost-efficient DAS solution for CCR-based Mailbox server clusters, and eliminating tape backups. All of these considerations resulted in significant cost savings. From backup changes alone, Microsoft IT realized a cost savings of approximately 5 million per year.”