ForestPrep and DomainPrep

Well, as promised last week, we are going to start off this week by finishing our look at Forestprep and Domainprep. After that, we will actually start through an actual installation of Exchange 2000 and see what’s new in the installation program. In case you have forgotten, you might want to look back at last weeks article for a quick review of how to run setup with either of these switches, as well as what each does.

When we were talking about Forestprep, we mentioned that this process was responsible for extending the AD schema for the introduction of the first Exchange server into our organization. The requirement to run Forestprep was to have both Schema admin and Enterprise Admin permissions. But in a smaller organization, you might be all of those things, as well as the Domain Administrator and the local administrator to boot. If this is the case, then you might not want to run forestprep as a separate process, but instead just run the installation program directly. You can do that, of course, but just be aware that the installation program will appear to take a long time to run, and it is because it will be running forestprep in the background. There is no way around extending the schema before introducing the first Exchange server into your Windows 2000 environment; the forestprep switch actually makes over 1800 changes to the schema of AD!! It is simply a question of whether you want to run forestprep by itself, or run it during the installation of the first Exchange 2000 server.