Exchange – The State Of External Client Access

Introduction

Most within the messaging and collaboration industry are hyped up about the next wave of Microsoft collaboration and messaging products which are soon to be released. Among these products is Exchange 2013 RTM. This type of release typically precedes yet another wave of architecture upgrades across the corporate landscape. Some of these (beta testers) will be will undoubtedly upgrade to Exchange 2013.

Other corporations will start to feel the burn to upgrade as well. These will be organizations which realize that their Exchange 2003/2007 infrastructure is nearing a decade old existence and cannot meet the demands of their ever growing mobile workforce. Realizing they are behind the curve, they may feel hastened to upgrade as well, possibly just to Exchange 2010. Regardless the reason in choosing to upgrade their messaging infrastructure, there are critical design decisions which need to be made in how clients access this infrastructure both internally and externally. This article focuses solely on the external access aspect of the infrastructure.

Lync 2010: IP/DNS Workbook

I just ran across a Lync article with all kinds of nice tables which distilled the myriad of DNS/IP addresses in a Lync deployment down to an easy to read format. I happen to have created one of these tables myself for a Lync deployment which included a standard Lync pool, XMPP gateway, Lync Mobility, and a single edge server. I figured others may find some use from it as it auto-populates the dns entries and what they are supposed to point to based on what you fill out for the highlighted cells. Sure you get some of this in the Lync Server 2010 Planning Tool but this offers a slightly different view of the environment as well as a nice one page overview.