16.4 Summary

The importance of Exchange 2000 in the enterprise is ever increasing. Exchange has steadily eaten away at the messaging market to the point where it is currently the market leader. In fact, the initial driving force behind the move to Active Directory for many organizations is the need to deploy Exchange 2000. Integrating Exchange into Active Directory is no small feat due to its heavy reliance on AD. For companies migrating from Exchange 5.5, the Active Directory Connector (ADC) can help in the transition, but it introduces additional support overhead.

While Exchange 2000 can be the most significant application you'll integrate with Active Directory, it is by no means the only one you can or should integrate. In the next chapter, we will dive into more details around the future of Microsoft's Directory Services strategy and how that impacts integration of applications with Active Directory.