Planning Site Layout

The site layout provides many views of user groups and their needs. When planning your sites, consider the following suggestions for designing your servers so that you make the tradeoffs that best suit the needs of your organization.

• Locate users and their home server on the same network segment. High network bandwidth between user and server is more important than high network bandwidth between servers.
• Group mailboxes that send messages to each other on the same server to take advantage of local delivery and single-instance storage.
• On a WAN, keep users on the same local area network (LAN) segment as their server to reduce the network traffic across bridges and routers.
• On a WAN, distribute client installation points, network shares, and the Microsoft Exchange Server Administrator program.
• Distribute mailboxes and important public folders so that failure doesn't stop business.
• Concentrate mission-critical mailboxes, public folders, and connectors on servers with fault-tolerant or upgradable hardware.

For more information, see Chapter 7, "Planning Your Sites."