Chapter 16. Integrating Microsoft Exchange

Exchange 2000 has been the driving reason behind many companies' move to Active Directory. Exchange 2000 requires an Active Directory infrastructure, and the dependencies it places on AD are not small. In fact, the Exchange 2000 schema extensions roughly double the size of the default Active Directory schema. There are also restrictions on the location of your domain controllers relative to the Exchange servers. For these reasons and the critical nature of email, calendar, and collaboration services, all of which Exchange can provide, it is clear that Exchange 2000 can be the most significant application you integrate into Active Directory.

In this chapter, we will briefly touch on some of the important issues regarding the integration of Exchange with Active Directory. We'll cover how to prepare the forest for Exchange and describe some of the changes this causes. Finally, we will review the Active Directory Connector (ADC), which aids in the transition from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000.