38Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0

Prerequisites

By now you have defined a set of acceptable service level agreements for your Exchange environment and you understand the concepts of availability management that were discussed in Chapter 2, “Capacity and Availability Management.”

Chapter Sections

This chapter covers the following procedures:

Change management

Configuration management

Change Management

Effective change management allows you to introduce change into your IT environment quickly and with minimal service disruption. Change management is responsible for changes in technology, systems, applications, hardware, tools, documentation, and pro- cesses, as well as changes in roles and responsibilities.

A key goal of the change management process is to ensure that all parties affected by a particular change understand the impact of the impending change. Because most systems are heavily interrelated, any change made in one part of a system can have major impacts on others. Change management attempts to identify all affected systems and processes before the change is implemented so that adverse effects can be minimized.

As with many areas of management, you can measure how effective your change manage- ment is by how boring it is. Providing a smooth running change management process is one of the most challenging aspects of IT management because of the very nature of what you are managing—change. With the proper processes in place however, your environment should run very smoothly.

Defining Change Type

To most effectively manage change within your organization, you need to categorize the types of changes that could occur. In Exchange, these changes could include the following:

Applying Service Packs

Adding new servers

Adding new users

Adding new administrative groups

Changing routing group topology

Changing backup and restore procedures

Modifying and applying policies

Changing other existing settings

Changing a process or script used to administer servers

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Microsoft 1 manual Change Management, Prerequisites, Defining Change Type