1
Introduction
Introduction
Welcome to the Microsoft® Exchange 2000 Server Operations Guide. This guide is designed
to give you the best information available on managing operations within an Exchange
2000 environment.
To manage Exchange in a day-to-day environment, an operations team needs to perform a
wide variety of procedures, including server monitoring, backup, verification of scheduled
events, protection against attack, and user support. This guide includes instructions for the
procedures along with steps for dealing with unresolved issues in a timely manner.

Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)

For operations to be as efficient as possible in your environment, you must manage them
effectively. To assist you, Microsoft has developed the Microsoft Operations Framework
(MOF). This is essentially a collection of best practices, principles, and models providing
you with technical guidance. Following MOF guidelines should help you to achieve mission-
critical production system reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability on
Microsoft products.
The MOF process model is split into four integrated quadrants. These are as follows:
Changing
Operating
Supporting
Optimizing
Together , the phases form a spiral life cycle (see Figure 1.1) that can apply to the opera-
tions of anything from a specific application to an entire operations environment with