Overview

You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you; you have to go them sometimes.

Winnie the Pooh (A. A. Milne)

Ever since Exchange 4.0 was released, I have beaten a big drum to tell people that they have to get their Windows NT design right before they begin to implement Exchange. There's a big difference deploying Exchange across a set of fragmented domains, each of which has its own administrators, and a deployment performed on top of a well-designed Windows NT environment. Many companies, especially those that deployed Windows NT as a replacement for workgroup sharing technologies like Windows for Workgroups, have what can only be described as a "legacy" Windows NT environment. It seems strange to describe Microsoft's premier operating system as a legacy, but any application or other system rapidly becomes a legacy once its time is past. The day of rolling out multiple domains in an unplanned or unstructured manner is gone, especially if you're interested in large-scale deployments.

Of course, because it's a messaging application, Exchange is always able to get the mail through as long as a suitable network connection exists between servers. A fragmented or unstable Windows NT environment might mean that the RPC-based site connector is unable to transport messages. The X.400 connector or Internet Mail Service (IMS) will always do the job.

It's fair to argue that all previous versions of Exchange are tightly integrated with Windows NT. Errors and warnings are reported...