The messaging environment, perhaps more than any other enterprise-wide service, depends upon a standard platform to ensure connectivity and transportability between users.
Email is the most commonly used network service that depends upon a messaging infrastructure.
For email to be effective at delivering messages end to end between users, the backbone components must support widely accepted standards for inter-system connectivity, directory synchronization and application development. Additionally, ITD provides X.500 directory synchronization services on this SMTP messaging backbone. ITD has chosen Microsoft s Exchange Server for its messaging engine. Exchange integrates cleanly with X.500 directory standards. Microsoft s commitment to support the evolving X.500 standards in future releases of Exchange is important in ITD s decision to use Exchange as the engine for its messaging backbone.