Top 5 Best Practices for Exchange Server 2007

If you are a system Administrator managing Exchange Server or interested to learn about this server, then this one is for you. Early this year when Microsoft released Exchange Server 2007, this was a boon for IT market. Infact this server is used even in non IT industry. Microsoft has put together many new services to make our office life easier and the project is still moving. They are also in process of integrating this service with the newly established era by Microsoft which is “Unified Communication”. For the readers who are not in this field, let me give an overview. Exchange Server is the name given to one of the server softwares by Microsoft which is used for e-mail communication by an organization. You see the mail ID’s like Virast.Khan@technicalherald.com that is because of a exchange server in which the email id (called as mailbox) is created which we can access to send and receive mails with the client software which is Microsoft Outlook and few others.


The best Practices of an Administrator managing Exchange Serve 2007 are as below:

Placing the exchange server in correct Network: As there will be many incoming and outgoing connections to this server, the network in which the server is placed really matter.

Use Security Configuration Wizard disable un-used connection ports as even a small security hole will be a major fallback.

Don’t Use Default certificates if you are using Microsoft’s firewall software ISA then you should know that there is no support for SNA (Subject Alternate name) in ISA 2004. To keep your support, you should upgrade to ISA 2006.

Disable HTTP connections if you have enabled web based access then make sure that encryption is on else snooping will be on.

Use client submission port. In Exchange 2007 you have different connectors for receiving and sending SMTP traffic.

Read indepth about each of the 5 above points at Microsoft Technet Center.