Several of the same principles that apply to forestprep also apply to the Active Directory domains. An administrator who has Domain Administrator permissions for that domain needs to have Exchange 2000 setup do several things to each Active Directory domain.

Exchange 2000 administrators do not need any special permissions in Active Directory other than those granted them by the Exchange Delegation Wizard from within the Exchange System Manager. This means that you can have a group of Exchange 2000 administrators who can only manage the Exchange 2000 objects and object containers in Active Directory. They don't have to be domain administrators or have any other special permission in the domain. This type of division is preferred by many organizations, but can become an issue during setup when Exchange is first being installed into the Active Directory domain. This is because Exchange 2000 setup performs the following tasks:

ÿÿÿÿ A user account named EUSER_EXSTOREEVENTS is created for use with the script event host.

ÿÿÿÿ An Exchange Domain Servers domain global group is created; this group contains all computers running Exchange 2000 in the domain.

ÿÿÿÿ An Exchange Enterprise Servers domain local group is created; this group contains all computers running Exchange 2000 in the enterprise.

ÿÿÿÿ Each of these groups is granted permission on objects in the Active Directory domain.

An administrator who has permissions in the domain can only perform these tasks by running Exchange 2000 setup with the domainprep switch.

Using Domainprep

Like forestprep, domainprep is a command-line switch used during deployment to prepare each Active Directory domain. If there are no Exchange implementers in the domain who are members of the Domain Administrators Group, then an administrator who is a member of the Domain Administrators Group can run domainprep to prepare the domain for Exchange 2000.

When running Exchange 2000 setup with the domainprep switch, DomainPrep will be the only component you can select, as shown in Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3 DomainPrep Component Selection

Setup will fail if you are not logged in as an Active Directory user who is a member of the Domain Administrators Group when domainprep is being run or when the first Exchange 2000 server is installed into the domain.

WARNING

As with forestprep, if you misspell /domainprep when starting Exchange 2000 setup with the domainprep switch on the command line, the standard Exchange 2000 setup will start and allow you to install Exchange 2000.

If you run Exchange 2000 setup without first running Exchange 2000 setup with the /domainprep switch, the domain modifications will be made; then Exchange 2000 will be installed. It is not necessary to run /domainprep before installing an Exchange 2000 server into the domain, but it is the best practice and recommended by Microsoft.

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