DESCRIPTION Taken from our full membership training course MCSE - Exchange Server 5.5 Support Skills, this is the first module from that course. TUTORIAL TAKEN FROM COURSE : MCSE - EXCHANGE SERVER 5.5 SUPPORT SKILLS FULL COURSE DETAILS:This course is designed to teach support professionals all they need to know to install, configure and support Microsoft Exchange Server in a Windows NT Environment. The client software used is Outlook. The following topics are covered on this course: Installing Exchange Server, Installing and Managing Outlook, Integration with the Internet, Designing forms, Public Folders, Managing Recipients, Installing connectors, and Directory Replication. This course prepares you for exam 70-081. What you will learn in this module: Overview of Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 Client-server based

messaging systems compared with file based messaging systems Overview of supported standards Integration with other messaging systems Client support and client overview NT Administration tools What is Exchange Exchange Server is a Client/server based messaging system which delivers the following services: E-mail Scheduling Document Sharing Electronic Forms Custom Applications It is now in it's fourth generation, if you count Exchange Server 2000. Exchange Server 5.5 offers a fully featured messaging system which can support small organizations (Small Business Server) at one end, and still scales really well for large organizations at the other (Enterprise Edition). File Based Messaging Systems In file based messaging systems, the following process takes place when a message is being sent and received. A client computer connects to a shared data area, and delivers the message into the appropriate folder for the recipient The recipient computer connects to the same server, and retrieves the message from their folder This scheme has several advantages and disadvantages: Advantages It is easy to maintain single-server file based messaging systems The server is basically a file store, and therefore does not need to be particularly powerful Disadvantages Because of the way that clients deliver messages, it means that all clients (and hence users) have full access to all folders within the shared messaging folder. This is clearly undesirable There is little distribution of processing effort - the client systems do all the work; the servers just store the messages The load on the network is often higher as client systems continually poll the file server system to see if there are messages waiting in the client's folder A good example of a file based messaging system is Microsoft's MS Mail program. Here client computers connected to a shared folder called MAILDATA. Post Offices were linked together to create networks of messaging servers. The program used to connect the Post Offices was called External, and essentially had connections to the MAILDATA folders on several servers simultaneously. Whilst MS Mail had limited scope for scaling to the enterprise, it didn't require a great deal of hardware to implement, and was relatively simple to maintain.