Best Practices

The following are best practices from this chapter:

• Review Chapter 1 to understand the common reasons organizations plan and deploy the Exchange 2003 messaging system.

• Leverage the planning and design details in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book to prepare the business for an appropriate messaging system design and configuration.

• The easiest way to install the first Exchange 2003 server in a new environment is to follow the interactive installation process initiated by an autorun automatic load from the Exchange Server 2003 CD.

• For an organization that will be installing many Exchange servers and wants to ensure an identical build between servers, creating an unattended installation script can ensure that a common installation process is followed.

• After installing Exchange 2003, consider locking down services that may not be needed—such as POP3, IMAP, and the like—which can improve security on the Exchange server.

• Create additional Exchange databases when the database file size begins to reach 15–20GB, to keep data backup, maintenance, and recovery to a more manageable level.

• Use system policies to minimize the effort it takes to manage servers individually when a single change in a group policy can automatically make changes on all servers simultaneously.

• Use a bridgehead server to minimize the traffic between site boundaries that can be better served by managed message transmission and routing.

• SMTP relaying should be enabled only when absolutely necessary, and when enabled should be properly locked down. This prevents spammers from gaining unauthorized access to relay spam messages.