In Part 2, I show you how to build a site link between two sites. However, in real life, networks that are big enough to be broken into sites tend to use more than two sites. When you start working with more than two sites, you run into some interesting situations. Of course, this is assuming that the site links involve common sites. Because these sites share common site links, each site can communicate directly with any other site, in much the same way that nodes on an IP-based network can communicate directly with each other.
Sites sharing a common link can communicate directly with each other.
To put this concept into more precise terms, when sites are bridged, they are said to be transitive in nature. This means that if you create a site link, any sites that fall into that site link are bridged automatically, and can therefore communicate directly with each other. If your entire organization is composed of sites that are linked by a single common site link, then those sites are automatically bridged, and are therefore transitive in nature. As you can see, Windows 2000 was designed in a way that was intended to save you work whenever possible. After all, in Part 2 I linked some sites together and the topic of a site link bridge never even came up.