Best Practices

To plan the deployment of Exchange Conferencing Server, consider the following strategies and practices:

Network Topology   If you plan to hold conferences with anyone outside your organization (for example, on the Internet), consider placing IIS on a server whose DNS host name can be resolved by both internal and external clients.

Conference Calendar Mailbox   It is preferable to keep the conference calendar mailboxes on the server with the active Conference Management Service. Performance may decrease if the calendar mailboxes are on different servers from the Conference Management Service.

Conference Resources and Conference Calendar Mailbox   On the server running Conference Management Service, make conference resources and the conference calendar mailbox the only mailboxes. If you must share this server with user accounts, put the conference resources and the conference calendar mailbox in a separate message database. This will minimize downtime if you need to restore scheduled conferences or move them to another message database.

Naming Conventions   Use descriptive names that distinguish your conference resources from physical meeting rooms. For example, you can use Virtual Team Conference (10) for the display name of a data and video conference resource with a maximum participation size of 10. To use resources more efficiently, you can define multiple resources of the same type but in different sizes. If you have multiple conferencing sites, use resource names to describe their locations.

Sites with Multiple Subnets   If your site has multiple subnets and some of the links are slow, place one or more MCUs on each subnet. Configure the MCUs to accept connections only from the users of that subnet.

IIS Location   Even if you are going to run IIS on the same server as Conference Management Service, change the meeting access location address to a virtual name for that server. This prevents conference participants from losing access to scheduled conferences if you decide to move IIS. You need to change the mapping on the DNS server to point the virtual name to the new IIS server.

Initial Implementation   Consider a phased rollout of Exchange Conferencing Server if you are new to online conferencing. Deploy the service on one server and give access to a single group. Then add additional servers and groups as demand increases for the service.