Microsoft Exchange 2000, Conferencing Server, and SharePoint Portal Server 2001: Planning, Deploying, and Supporting the Future of Knowledge Management Solutions
Authors: Rand Morimoto, Chris Doyle, Joe Pennetta
Venue:  (2001)

From the Book:For the past 10 years, information technology implementations have focused on product features and functions. In today's environment, organizations need to focus on solutions that improve user productivity to remain competitive in the global information age. This book focuses on several technologies available from Microsoft that create a knowledge and information sharing environment. Combined, these technologies provide a method for users to store documents and electronic messages, carry on real-time video and data conferencing, and index large volumes of data. Through the use of Digital Dashboards (Chapter 8), an organization can centralize all of the information into a customized front-end client. The way this book was written, there is significant information that is appropriate for readers ranging from a high-level information technology executive needing to understand the technologies noted, to a systems engineer rolling up their sleeves to actually implement and support the technologies. A wide gamut of readers can gain value from this book by understanding how Exchange 2000, Conferencing Server, and SharePoint Portal Server can be leveraged to create a knowledge and information sharing environment all the way through the actual implementation and ongoing support of the solution. This book covers the Microsoft Exchange 2000 product from planning to design, through prototype testing, to implementation and migration, and finally maintenance and support. As the electronic messaging infrastructure component of Microsoft's application server suite of products, Exchange 2000 can be the true backbone of communications (both internal and external) for organizations both large and small. Not only has electronic messaging become a mission critical communications medium for organizations, the Exchange 2000 product is the first Microsoft product that fully leverages the Windows 2000 Active Directory infrastructure. There are several other new technologies that Microsoft will be introducing in many of their other future products where Exchange 2000 is the first to adopt the technology. These new technologies are introduced in the first part of this book. The book is broken into three major parts. Part I starts with the development of the core infrastructure (Chapters 2-5) from which the knowledge and information sharing environment is built. The environment is built on a solid Windows 2000 Active Directory, DNS, and Exchange 2000 configuration. For organizations that are currently using Exchange 5.5, Chapter 6 of this book walks the Exchange administrator through the process of upgrading the core environment to Exchange 2000. The second part of the book extends the core messaging environment to develop the video and data conferencing functions of the Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server product for real-time collaboration and communication (Chapters 10-12). The third part of the book adds in SharePoint Portal Server 2001, which provides document management and indexing throughout the enterprise (Chapters 13-15). In addition to walking the reader through the building blocks of developing the knowledge and information sharing infrastructure as well as developing the client front-end, this book also helps the reader strengthen the security for the information sharing environment and develop a clustered fault tolerant infrastructure (Chapter 7). Once the knowledge management environment has been built, it is important to develop and implement maintenance routines to keep the environment operational (Chapter 9) as would be expected in a mission-critical communication infrastructure. It was our goal to take this book far beyond a basic installation and configuration guide, and truly help the reader develop a reliable infrastructure from which a full knowledge and information sharing environment could be built. As a team that has worked with Windows 2000, Exchange 2000, Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server, and SharePoint Portal Server 2001 years before the official release of the products, it is our hope that our knowledge and experiences, along with best practices, have been thoroughly captured and documented throughout the pages of this book.