Today's book excerpt (Windows Small Business Server 2003 Best Practices) has a messaging buffet:

Multiple MX records

Instant Message

Exchange Migrations

Extending Exchange

Whew -enjoy the read....there is a lot here!

cheers...harrybbbb (your fellow Microsoft Small Business Specialist - SBSC)

Harry Brelsford, CEO of SMB Nation, www.smbnation.com

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Mail Bagging and Multiple MX Records

No, this isn’t a paragraph that will replay a tale of sassy Samantha (a lead character on HBO’s popular program Sex in the City) having a racy encounter with a postal worker. Rather, this is about having a backup location for your e-mail to flow to when your SBS 2003 server machine (properly running Exchange for SMTP e-mail) is offline. Instead of the senders in the “offline SBS 2003 server machine” situation receiving an NDR or bounced e-mail

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message, these incoming e-mails can temporarily reside on another mail server. Later on, you would retrieve and properly distribute these e-mails using a tool such as the POP3 Connector in SBS 2003 that was discussed above.

BEST PRACTICE: If you think you might like to have this form of messaging redundancy, consult with your ISP to arrange it. Your ISP, who I assume is holding your DNS records, will need to enter a second MX record with a lower priority that points to a backup mail server (typically maintained by the ISP).

I’ll cover this topic more, including more procedural steps, in my

forthcoming advanced SBS 2003 book due in mid-2004.

Exchange Migrations

This topic, another one way outside the SPRINGERS story line, merits mention nonetheless. You might find yourself in a situation where you need to move Exchange data because of an upgrade or migration. While I discuss upgrades and migrations more in Appendix B, the point is that you’ll possibly encounter such a scenario and you need at least some basic guidance.

The tools that you’ll use to migrate Exchange data is the ExMerge tool. For the latest discussion on the use of ExMerge, visit www.microsoft.com/technet and search on the “exmerge” term. You’ll see the page in Figure 6-13 that advises you to download the Exchange 2003: Mailbox Merge Wizard (ExMerge) tool.

BEST PRACTICE: Yes - you read correctly. The ExMerge tool is now downloaded. In the SBS 2000 time frame, it was found on the SBS setup disc that contained the Exchange application. Such is not the case in the SBS 2003 time frame.

Notes:

Figure 6-13

Go here for the ExMerge tool to migrate your all-important Exchange data.

So a few pointers to send you forward with respect to Exchange’s ExMerge tool:

•          ;          &nbs p;  This version of ExMerge requires an “ExMerge” user account with administrator-level permissions to function correctly. This wasn’t the case in the SBS 2000 timeframe.

•          ;          &nbs p;  ExMerge can be run against older versions of Exchange (5.5, 2000) and thus serves as an effective migration tool.

•          ;          &nbs p;  ExMerge interacts with mailboxes, not public folders or Internet favor­ites. This interaction is basically import and export capabilities. You will need to manually import and export the content of public folders using the Import and Export option on the File menu in Outlook. Internet favorites, accessible from Outlook and considered by some to be part of the messaging migration mix, can be either manually migrated or migrated by using the profile migration capabilities of the Add User Wizard that was explored in Chapter 4.

 

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BEST PRACTICE: There is a key, public folders point to make about that bullet above. As you’ll learn later, the SBS development team has dramatically increased the visibility of public folder usage by creating company-related objects in SBS 2003. So it’s a reasonable assumption that you will put important data in the company-related public folder objects (such as maintaining a company-wide customer contacts). Given that, you will need to manually migrate such data.

•           If ExMerge fails with a mailbox (this can happen when a PST file you’re working with has been flagged to read-only and would occur if you moved a PST file by writing it to a CD disc), then you can always revert back to the manual import/export capability in Outlook as described in the bullet above.

BEST PRACTICE: Microsoft has posted additional migration guidance at www.microsoft.com/exchange. As of this writing, there is a scenario for migrating from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003.

Instant Messaging - NOT!

It’s unfortunate but true in SBS 2003 that the Exchange Server 2003 component has removed the instant messaging capability that many of us enjoyed in the SBS 2000 time frame. Many readers will recall that my prior book, Small Business Server 2000 Best Practices, provided the procedures for configuring this wonderful cool tool.

In the SBS 2003 time frame, you will now need to supply Instant Messaging functionality differently. You can purchase Microsoft’s new Live Communications Server, starting at $1,059 with five CALs (your rich SBS CALs do not cover this server application). Live Communication Server information is shown in Figure 6-14.

BEST PRACTICE: A member of the SBS development team has confirmed that Live Communications Server does install and function for internal messaging in SBS 2003. However, users will need to logon to the instant messaging client with their internal name (e.g. Normh@springersltd.local). There will be a white paper out that

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will teach you how to intregrate SBS 2003 and Live Communications Server (no publication date available at my press deadline).

Figure 6-14

Those SBS legacy sites that utilize Instant Messaging will need to strongly consider Live Communications Server to deliver the same functionality in the SBS2003 time frame.

BEST PRACTICE: There is a poor man’s way to deliver instant messaging on an SBS 2003 network: Use MSN. That’s right! The Internet-based MSN instant messaging capability, described in Figure 6-15, may be just the cheapo ticket you’re looking for. Visit www.msn.com/people, but be advised one drawback of this approach is that your chat traffic will result in increased Internet traffic, and there is a huge assumption that you have Internet connectivity!

Note that some readers have reported that they prefer the instant messaging solution from Yahoo! at www.yahoo.com.

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Figure 6-15

Consider MSN to restore basic instant messaging (called IM by some folks) to SBS 2003.

Extending Exchange

Some topics fit better under a heading about extending Exchange, rather than peeking under the hood as the last section did. In this section, I’ll share some thoughts about implementing Exchange in SBS 2003 on a storage area network (SAN), support for multiple Exchange servers, and use of Exchange Conferencing Server.

Storage Area Networks

The consultants and trainers in the readership of this book will appreciate the following sentiment. Because of your numerous customers, you see and hear a lot of things you might not otherwise think of yourself. Such was the case recently in Phoenix (the city, not the bird) where a keen student attending the SBS 2003 hands-on labs asked about redirecting the Exchange Store database to a SAN during the setup of SBS 2003. The answer is that this is supported. On

the SBS 2003 Setup page that speaks towards data folder redirection (see Figure 3-21), you would redirect the Exchange Store to a SAN via a Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path such as \\server2\storage\exchange.

Multiple Exchange Servers

This is the type of paragraph I like to insert in a book such as this for the SBS gurus out there who aren’t happy with a text until the find something they don’t know. Then these same gurus are your friends for life. So here is such an opportunity. You CAN have multiple Exchange servers on the same SBS 2003 network. You might want do this to shoehorn SBS 2003 into a multiple office scenario or to gain some form of messaging database redundancy. This would be accomplished by purchasing a second copy of Exchange Server 2003 (standard edition) and installing it on a second server running Windows Server 2003 (which you would also need to purchase). You would then link the Exchange servers together as part of the Exchange Server site.

The bottom line for introducing another Exchange server machine into your SBS 2003 network? You’d be out the following “hard costs”:

•          ;          &nbs p;  Exchange Server 2003 standard edition: $699 USD

•          ;          &nbs p;  Exchange 2003 User CAL: $67 USD/each user

•          ;          &nbs p;  Windows Server 2003: $999 USD

•          ;          &nbs p;  HP ML 350 Server Machine (adequately equipped): $1,500

 

If you total the above figures, you’ll see that you’ll pay a handsome price to introduce a second Exchange server machine in the small business. But it can be done.

BEST PRACTICE: Having a need to discuss the use of multiple Exchange servers might really be a customer’s cry for more information about whether SBS with its Exchange Server 2003 SKU is really the best fit. Consider visiting the comparison chart of all Exchange Server 2003 SKUs (including SBS 2003) at www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/Mail_compare.asp as

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seen in Figure 6-16 below to answer your own Exchange right­

sizing questions.

Figure 6-16

Use this page to, at a glance, line up Exchange features and better understand what the capabilities and limitations are in SBS 2003.