Overview

As we've seen in Chapter 2, the AD is a fundamental part of the Windows 2000 operating system and that Exchange 2000 swaps the DS for the AD. In summary, the swap is accomplished by the following

• Holding Exchange-centric information about mailboxes, contacts, and groups as additional attributes for objects in the AD domain naming context.
• Storing information about Exchange servers is in the AD configuration naming context.
• Extending the AD schema to provide support for Exchange-specific attributes.

These steps lay the foundation and provide storage for 95% of all of the information previously held in the DS. The additional information, such as data about the number and server location of public folder replicas, is moved into new tables in the Store. Achieving a solid implementation of the AD lays the foundation for your Exchange 2000 deployment. If you're migrating from a previous version of Exchange, you will go through a period of coexistence when both versions will be in production, and you'll need to connect the DS with the AD.

This chapter covers the interaction between Exchange and the AD, including how to synchronize it with the DS. We'll also review various migration scenarios and some of the steps you can take to ease the move to Exchange 2000 before discussing how Exchange 2000 is integrated into Windows 2000 management.

3.1 Connecting Exchange 2000 to the Active Directory

All server-side connections from Exchange 2000 into the AD are made using a software layer called the DSAccess API (also...