Exchange 2007

Introduction
Before you dive in and start installing Exchange 2007, you should take the time to understand the steps required to prepare your Active Directory environment to receive Exchange 2007.In this four-part article I will be taking a more in-depth look at what these preparatory steps are and, perhaps more importantly, what tools and processes you can use to determine whether they havecompleted successfully or not.
Before we get going there are one or two important things to discuss first. One statement that I’m sure you must have heard by now is that Exchange 2007 is only supportedon 64-bit hardware. You are probably also aware that there is a 32-bit version of Exchange 2007 available for non-production scenarios such as training and lab environments. As you will see later inthis article, some of the commands required to prepare Active Directory for Exchange 2007 must be run on specific servers that aren’t typically Exchange 2007 servers and could therefore be running on32-bit hardware. If that’s the case and it’s known that Exchange 2007 isn’t supported on 32-bit hardware, how can these commands be performed with full support from Microsoft? In these cases, youshould be aware that Microsoft does support the use of the 32-bit version of Exchange 2007 for performing specific Active Directory preparation tasks, such as extending the schema. With that in mind, makesure you have a copy of the 32-bit version of Exchange 2007 handy if you know that you have, say, only 32-bit domain controllers throughout your environment.
You will note throughout the steps inthis article that it’s possible to have the process you are currently running perform the previous processes if they have been omitted. For example, if you forget to prepare the legacy permissionsfirst, this step will be automatically performed when the schema is updated. You might wonder, then, if it’s better to just perform as few steps as possible rather than do each step individually....