2.5 What needs to be managed?

What is involved in managing Exchange, and how large an operations staff is needed? In small companies, a small number of people may have responsibility for multiple areas, whereas in large corporations, many people may have roles with narrow sets of responsibilities. Often, these people are from separate organizations.

Regardless of the number of people used to manage Exchange or the size of the organization, specific types of management activities must be performed. Examining a typical Exchange implementation helps identify the areas where management must be performed.

• Exchange organization. An Exchange organization is a hierarchical collection of Exchange routing groups, administrative groups, and servers. The complete collection of Exchange components is known as the organization. The Exchange organization consists of one or more routing groups and one or more administrative groups. An Exchange routing group contains one or more Exchange servers. The servers within an Exchange routing group are connected by a high-bandwidth permanent network connection. (You can use slower network connections between routing groups in your Exchange organization but not within a routing group.) The number of routing groups, administrative groups, and servers required in an enterprise depends on several factors, including the number of users, the number of corporate locations, the network bandwidth between locations, the availability of local IT support staff, and corporate politics. Two enterprises with exactly the same number of users may have an entirely different Exchange organization topology because of differences in network bandwidth,...