Microsoft Press Study Reveals Hosted Exchange Server 2010 Best Practices

While more and more organizations have been adopting the Microsoft (News - Alert) Hosted Exchange Server 2010 solution, some vital areas that are usually ignored include the internal or organization-facing namespace and external or Internet-facing namespace. A namespace is a logical structure that is denoted by one or more domain names in a domain name system (DNS), said a study titled, ‘Siegfried Jagott and Joel Stidley, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Best Practices’ published by Microsoft Press, 2010.

The report emphasized that although namespace planning plays an important role within the Client Access Hosted Exchange Server, still the Hub Transport and Edge Transport roles also need to be considered with due care. Microsoft has issued an official support statement for Exchange 2010 and SLD/Disjoint/Non-contiguous Namespaces.

Enterprises need to decide how their internal and external namespace will be defined within the implementation of their Hosted Exchange 2010 organization, as it helps them in ensuring proper DNS configuration of their Hosted Exchange servers and appropriate creation of their certificates. Further, the decision also affects the Client Access granted to the enterprises, including Outlook Anywhere, Outlook Web App, POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP.

If the Hosted Exchange 2010 servers are located at premises equipped with multiple data centers, the namespaces must be planned, keeping a number of things in mind, such as both the data centers must be active as it allows for incremental deployment and enables the enterprises to offer failover capabilities or can manually switch over a data center. On the basis of the client connectivity capabilities, each of the data centers need a range of namespaces, including Outlook Web App, OA, Exchange Web Services, Exchange ActiveSync namespace; POP3 or IMAP4 namespace; RPC Client Access namespace and SMTP namespace.

Initially, the companies must keep all the locations of clients and servers and the physical connections they have to the Hosted Exchange servers in mind even before they begin planning their namespace. The namespaces align with their DNS configuration, and they can plan the namespaces on the basis of a number of factors, such as consolidated data center, single namespace with proxy sites, single namespace with multiple sites, regional namespaces, multiple forests and Consolidated Data Center.

In November 2010, 123Together.com (News - Alert), as a Hosted Exchange reseller, announced Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Hosted Edition to its customers. Microsoft Exchange Server is a flexible and reliable messaging platform that helps clients to lower messaging costs by 50 to 80 percent and increase productivity with anywhere access to business communications.