Gathering the business requirements

As described in the introduction, there are different things that come into play when designing an Exchange 2013 Infrastructure. This topic will guide you through the process of gathering different business requirements that should help you design and plan for Exchange 2013.

Getting ready

To complete the following steps, you need to identify the different stake holders in your organization. They will be able to help you get the right information you need to get going with your design.

How to do it…

Before diving into the technicalities, let's stop for a moment and have a look at how you can help your company define the business requirements. Part of this process, but focused mainly on how to design for (high) availability, is also described in Chapter 6, Implementing and Managing High Availability.

A good point to start is by asking yourself (or the people capable of answering them) the following questions:

• How is the system going to be used? That is, what clients will be connecting to the environment?

• Do I need to provide external access to my clients? That is, are they required to connect over the internet or should clients only be able to connect from within the corporate network?

• Are there any regulatory requirements towards security or data retention?

• What does my support organization look like? Is there a team dedicated to Exchange? Is there a helpdesk? Who is responsible for what?

Next, ask yourself if and what issues you are trying to solve. Maybe your company is looking to move to Exchange Server 2013 to solve a specific business problem? If so, start by outlining how you could solve that problem without going into too much detail. The idea is that you should end up with a list of Exchange features that you need to incorporate into your final design.

Lastly, in order to be able to size the environment properly, you should ask the following questions:

• What is the mailbox size limit?

• Are other limits defined? For instance, ask for the maximum message size.

• You should also gather statistics on the usage of your current system, including the following:

• The amount of messages sent per day, per user

• The average message size

• The total amount of users, including plans for future growth (if any)

Tip

In some cases you'll find that companies don't really enforce a mailbox size or other size limits. In such cases, it's a good idea to propose a size limit yourself. Trying to design for unlimited mailbox sizes is not only very hard, but it's also a recipe for disaster unless your company is operationally mature enough to deal with it.

There's more...

For more information on how to gather usage statistics yourself, have a look at the following section, Sizing Exchange 2013.