Exchange 2000 Server, the successor to Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange Server 5.5, offers new bells and whistles that take the application well beyond its e-mail roots. It also offers many meat-and-potatoes improvements that administrators have been requesting. But Exchange 2000 is also not your typical upgrade. This is the first major application from Microsoft that requires Active Directory (AD) -- in other words, you can't implement Exchange 2000 until you upgrade all of your Exchange servers to Windows 2000 and create an organizationwide AD structure. This is, in fact, a daunting task that's been slowing down many Windows 2000 Server implementations.

In short, Exchange 2000 Server is a major infrastructure upgrade that will take time to plan and implement correctly.

"What people have to do to move to Exchange 2000 is a lot of work," says Joyce Graff, an analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group Inc. "If you don't have the whole top-to-bottom Microsoft solution, you don't feel all the benefits." But, she adds, "I think this will be one of the drivers for [organizations to migrate to] Windows 2000."

Exchange now includes collaborative features such as instant messaging and the Web Storage System -- a universal, fully indexed container for e-mail message folders and Microsoft Office documents that users can access through Windows Explorer, a Web browser or an Outlook client. And a new add-on, Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server, adds application sharing and multicast videoconferencing services.

E-mail improvements include support for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions content and Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) routing, as well as the ability to consolidate routing groups and delegate administrative tasks at a more granular level than Exchange 5.5 supports. Administrators can now chop up those ever-expanding message databases into smaller, more manageable ones. And enhanced clustering support enables both server consolidation and improved fault tolerance.

Reasons to Migrate

One benefit of migrating to Exchange 2000 is server consolidation.

"In our larger locations, where we have 2,000 or more people, we think we'll win from the consolidation. They will have less servers to administer," says Vicki Fredrick, IT director at Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc. But, she warns, "we're not ever going to sell this purely on administration. We're selling it as an integrated platform."

Bridgewater, N.J.-based Aventis has 50,000 e-mail users on 181 Exchange 5.5 servers in 100 locations worldwide. In the pilot phase of Aventis' migration to Exchange 2000 at its Kansas City, Mo., offices, the company consolidated 4,500 Exchange 5.5 users on nine servers onto just two Exchange 2000 servers.

"You couldn't do this under the previous architecture of Exchange," says Henry Creagh, a consultant at Aventis. "The main reason why most places have so many Exchange servers is because they didn't want their Exchange database that had all the user mail to get too large. [If it did,] they couldn't back it up and restore it to meet their service-level agreements," he adds.

And there was another incentive to keep databases small, says Graff: Exchange 5.5 databases larger than 60MB have

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