This book, Planning, describes the tasks and decisions that must be completed to develop a framework suitable for hosting a large number of customers and users in a shared forest environment. The companion volume, Deployment, builds on that information and includes the step-by-step procedures required to implement this design.

While this guide is primarily focused on the Application Service Provider hosting their customers' messaging infrastructures, the issues and concepts discussed here can be used by any organization to provide access to the full range of Exchange 2000 Server facilities across a public network.

This book covers the following topics:

• Defining your service
• Planning client facilities
• Creating the network architecture
• Designing the Domain Name System infrastructure
• Active Directory considerations
• Planning the front-end servers
• Planning the back-end servers
• Provisioning and billing