Question 4: How Much Do You Leverage Exchange?
If you have Win2K, you might also have Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 5.5. If you do, your outlook for upgrading to Windows 2003 isn't so rosy. Windows 2003's IIS 6.0 is incompatible with Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5. Therefore, if you plan to keep or install new Exchange 2000 or Exchange 5.5 servers within your forthcoming Windows 2003 AD implementation, you'll need to continue to put the Exchange software on Win2K or NT Server.
If you choose to upgrade to Windows 2003 in other areas of your network, you'll simply be supporting two (or perhaps more) server platforms. Ideally, you would want to support just one server platform. However, if you have Exchange 2000 or Exchange 5.5, you'll necessarily have to support more than one. For that reason, if you have Exchange 2000 or Exchange 5.5, you'll have to subtract points for the headache that you'll doubtlessly experience while maintaining multiple server infrastructures.
Windows 2003 offers improved domain controller (DC) and Global Catalog (GC) performance, including the ability to refrain from resyncing all the partial attributes. However, you'll need all Windows 2003 DCs to take advantage of this functionality.
If your business's current use of Exchange 2000 or Exchange 5.5 is
- heavy, subtract 5 points
- medium, subtract 4 points
- light, subtract 2 points
To read about the combinations of Windows and Exchange that Microsoft supports, see the white paper "Microsoft Exchange Server Compatibility with Microsoft Windows Server Operating Systems"(http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/ti/tiwin2003.doc).
Question 5: Do You Have Branch Offices?
Windows 2003 introduces many goodies for organizations that have branch offices. The Knowledge Consistency Checker (KCC) can now gracefully handle more (many, many more) than 200 branch-office sites. Also, you can now instruct bridgehead servers not to compress data over WAN links. And you can use the new Install From Media feature to populate DCs from tape or other media, rather than over the network. This feature is quite beneficial in large domains spread across WAN links. Note that all the features (except Install From Media) listed in this category require that every DC in every domain run Windows 2003.
You'll gain the most benefit from these features if you have many branch offices. If you have no branch offices, these features won't do anything for you.
If you have
- a large number of branch offices (e.g., 50 or more), add 6 points
- a moderate number of branch offices (e.g., 30 to 49), add 3 points
- a small number of branch offices (e.g., 1 to 30), add 2 points
- no branch offices, add 0 points
