Before deploying the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you need to assess your business, define your business goals with regard to the solution, and then determine what gaps exist between your current status quo and the one that you want to achieve.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 deployment depends on an organization's current business model and infrastructure. For example, how do you sell the Exchange service? What is the current service usage? What is the provisional cost? What is the operational cost? How many MAPI users vs. OWA users? How many non-MAPI users plan to migrate to OWA in one year? How many MAPI mailbox users plan to purchase additional mobile devices and would like mails to be pushed to the devices? How many mailboxes per organization and what is the average size of the mailbox per user? How to reduce operational cost by encouraging users to adopt new Office products like Outlook 2007 and migrate to more effectively OAB web distribution?

Different business and infrastructure require different plan strategy. When you plan your hosted Exchange deployment, we suggest that you consider the three services that Microsoft Hosted Exchange offers: hosted E-mail services, hosted unified services, and hosted mobile services. For more information about these three types of services, see Hosted Services.

Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) Software Development Kit (SDK) offers powerful and detailed Hosted Exchange plan and resources management features. The procedures inside the namespaces in MPS SDK address how to create, modify and delete mail plans and how to collect plan related information. You can get the MPS SDK document from the Microsoft contact or through the Microsoft download center.

This section provides planning information and information about what is new in this release to help you plan your deployment. This section also outlines the main tasks including a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 SP1 deployment. Steps for these tasks are provided in Build Hosted Exchange(Windows Server 2003 Environment) or Build Hosted Exchange(Windows Server 2008 Environment).

Security Note:
The centralized management solution feature provides essential services for manageability, scale, and capacity. All of the hosting scenarios discussed in the solution benefit from a centrally managed platform built around Active Directory service.

For more information about deployment planning, see Planning Your Deployment.

See Who will be Successful Running Hosted Messaging and Collaboration for more information about hosting solution scenarios.

Examples of Company Names

The reference architecture uses fictitious company names when discussing example implementations. These names correspond to the organizational units (OUs) as follows:

  • Hoster - fabrikam is the example service provider.
  • Reseller - consolidatedmessenger is the example reseller. consolidatedmessenger resells hosting capacity to customers.
  • Customers - wingtiptoys, litwareinc, alpineskihouse, and northwindtraders are the example customers.
Note:
Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.0 and previous solutions have shipped with two different and segmented user models: the Business Model and Consumer Model. The consumer model was a very limited model with respect to the feature set and the ability to up-sell users to better or more diverse services. To give consumers or newly called “individual information workers (IIW)” the same up-sell capabilities that Business users have today, IIW model is introduced in Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.5.