7.1 Introduction

Building a solid Windows 2000 infrastructure merely provides a robust platform for a new Exchange 2000 deployment. But what of the work required to evolve your Exchange 5.5 environment to the brave new world that is Exchange 2000? This is not just an upgrade of a few binaries; this is the reengineering of a whole infrastructure. We're presented with almost myriad challenges: providing mail coexistence between Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000, providing synchronization services between the Exchange 5.5 Directory Service and the Active Directory, and how to move Exchange 5.5 mailboxes to Exchange 2000 mailboxes. Of course, we haven't even mentioned Public Folder infrastructures, business applications built on top of Exchange 5.5, and potentially other third-party products that have been integrated into your Exchange environment. And, if that wasn't enough, we also need to be concerned with the effort that's required to upgrade the underlying infrastructure that Exchange 2000 will run on. In all likelihood, you'll probably have Windows NT4 deployed for account domains and resource domains for Exchange 5.5 servers; these domains will need to be upgraded to Windows 2000.

As you can see, moving up to Exchange 2000 isn't just about upgrading a single software product: It's about building a new infrastructure and doing so in a smooth and transparent way so that none of your existing users has an interruption in service. It's not impossible to do, and in the remainder of this chapter, we'll explore the different tools and techniques that are critical for...