As many of you know my company is implemeting Active Directory and MS Exchange over the next month. We decided to contract First Tech Computer in Minneapolis to handle the migration from our NT4 domain to Active Directoy and setup/configure MS Exchange to handle our email and eventually our other collaboration efforts. I must say that I have been VERY happy with how it has gone so far. We are all setup and ready to go with some minor cleaning up to do with respects to our NT4 accounts and email accounts, lists, etc. Scott at First Tech has been amazing in not only the setup and configuration of both AD and Exchange, but with explaining himself along the way and making sure I’m involved with things I need to care about once he’s gone. I am also very happy with how Dantz Retrospect handles the backup of Exchange. We tested it out and it is really slick. I have to start getting in the mind set that everything will now reside on a server instead of our clients POP’ing there mail into the email client. It’s amazing to me that Retrospect can backup an individual mailbox and retrieve an individual message back out of the mailbox. Hopefully our users will not start being careless with respect to there email messages because I can see how this could suck up a lot of IT resources.

As we go along with the setup/migration I will keep you updated because I know a lot of people out there have opinions on Exchange and especially how it plays with the Mac. I too have read all the good and bad that people have to say. I will bring you an objective (as much as I can be) perspective of how it’s going and how it actually goes on D-Day (the weekend of Feb. 25th) when we actually go live.

That is all for now. I wonder which of the newly formed MS Companies handles Exchange. Does anyone know. I know MS broke up into three companies, one that handles the OS, one that handles XBox on peripherals and one that handles Office. Am I wrong on this?