The time has come to look at the Exchange messaging migration not as a one-time event, but as a continuous transition. Exchange does not exist on its own; it is just one piece of a corporate technology puzzle, but an extremely important one at that. While regularly viewed as strictly a commodity, misused and often abused, it quickly becomes a mission critical application in cases of failure.
It is absolutely critical to realize that the Exchange messaging environment at an enterprise of virtually any size is never at a “steady state,” it is undergoing a constant transformation involving and impacting a number of components: hardware, software, network, directories, servers, users, and data. The goal of this document is to serve as a guide to a better understanding of how to make this transformation more predictable, manageable, in other words, intelligent.