Windows Server 2008 as a Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange Server unites users with knowledge anytime, anywhere. Exchange is designed to meet the messaging and collaboration needs of small organizations, large distributed enterprises, and everything in between. Microsoft Exchange integrates with Windows Server 2008, although there have been a few hairy incompatibility problems with Exchange 2007 on the RTM build of Windows Server 2008. We list a few of the Exchange Server main services in the following sections.
Internet Information Services integration
Exchange is also integrated with IIS to provide for high-performance mail protocols, SMTP protocols, and POP protocols. Exchange also provides a browser interface to access the Microsoft Outlook Web Access client.
Active Directory integration
Active Directory, which is covered in more detail in the final chapters of this book, is an enterprise directory service that is highly scalable and fully integrated with Exchange at the system level. Exchange takes full advantage of the Windows Server 2008 Active Directory; with but a single point of administration, it enables users to control all messaging services seamlessly.
All directory information, including users, mailboxes, servers, sites, and recipients, is stored in Active Directory. Administrators benefit from the unified administration, experience no user-interface changes, and require no retraining after switching to Active Directory. Integration features of Exchange Server and Active Directory include the following:
- Unified administration of Exchange Server and Windows Server 2008 enables an administrator to manage all user data in one place using one set of tools.
- Security groups in Windows Server 2008 can be automatically used as Exchange distribution lists, removing the need to create a parallel set of distribution lists for each department or group.
- Active Directory's schema extensibility enables the management of distributed information and easily configurable Exchange user and server information.
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a native access protocol for directory information.
Distributed services
Distributed services enable subsystems to use storage, protocol, and directories on different computers, providing for scalability for millions of users. This system is extremely configurable, providing extensibility and flexibility for system architecture.
Security
Exchange Server offers you the only messaging system that is fully integrated with the Windows Server 2008 security model. Administrators use the Windows Server 2008 security model to define the permissions for all messaging and collaboration services, including public folders. This means that administrators can learn a single permissions model for managing both Windows Server 2008 and Exchange and can create a single set of security groups to apply to either Windows Server 2008 resources or Microsoft Exchange objects. This helps simplify your domain administration, and Exchange Server enables permissions to be set at the item or document level. Security descriptors can be set for messages and components. These features provide for new levels of security.
Single-seat and policy-based administration
Microsoft Exchange uses a graphic administration and monitoring system that integrates with Windows Server 2008's Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to provide single-seat administration.
The MMC does not provide you with management capabilities, but with a common interface that enables you to manage all your needs. The Microsoft Exchange System Manager, Microsoft Active Directory, and Internet Services Manager are snap-ins that provide the management for Server 2008. Policy-based management provides the administrator with the capability to perform single operations made up of hundreds of objects. Policies are a set of objects defined by the administrator. The administrator can also define recipient policies that could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of users, groups, and contacts in Active Directory.
SMTP message routing
Exchange Server supports SMTP, POP, LDAP, IMAP, HTTP, NNTP, S/MIME, and X.509 version 3. This versatility enables Exchange Server to act as an organization's gateway to the Internet. Providing high-performance routing of e-mail services, SMTP is, by default, the transport protocol for routing all message traffic between servers, within an Exchange site and between sites. Your organization's use of SMTP results in increased performance and new opportunities for integration with the Internet.
Exchange Server's message algorithms have been enhanced to provide fault-tolerant message delivery and to eliminate messages that bounce, even when multiple servers or network links are down. This provides for increased message bandwidth and performance. SMTP routing provides customers with considerable flexibility in designing a reliable, high-performance messaging backbone by using Exchange Server.
Internet mail content
Exchange Server can significantly increase performance of e-mail, because you use e-mail clients to store and retrieve Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) content directly from the base, without any form of content conversion. Client software such as Outlook enables you to stream data in and out of the database.
This process helps performance immensely. All the features discussed in the preceding sections provide low cost-of-ownership, which makes Microsoft Exchange Server a valuable asset to every organization.
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