Hi, I will be installing exchange 2007 soon and its been a long time(5.5) since iv touched it....is it a straight forward install now or can things still go horribly wrong and secondly i have a public IP on one side of our router and was planning on port forwarding to the soon to be built server is that okay or not ideal??i will need outlook web access and mobile?? thanks

Candidly speaking, we have no knowledge of your skill set or technical aptitude. What's striaght forward for one person is not to another. You mention 5.5. If you are still on 5.5, you will first need to migrate to Exchange 2003 before you can install Exchange 2007 and then migrate to it. There is no direct 5.5 -> 2007 solution except maybe with some third party tool that I am not aware of. If you are referring to a clean install of a brand new email system (with no legacy email system to upgrade), *I* think the deployment is pretty straight forward. You would choose the "typical" deployment setting which installs the Mailbox server role, the Client Access Server role (OWA), and the Hub Transport server role (SMTP) all on the same box. It's up to you to create more databases beyond the default database, and to move stuff around to seperate disks (even the smallest Exchange system should not be 100% installed on a single hard drive). Most small businesses choose the "typical" deployment setting, and just forward port 443 (HTTPS) and 25 (SMTP) directly to their backend server. You might consider using ISA 2006 to sit in the middle of the firewall/router and your Exchange server, but most small busniesses don't want to justify the cost of another server and ISA 2006. Good luck!

HotFix wrote: Candidly speaking, we have no knowledge of your skill set or technical aptitude. What's striaght forward for one person is not to another. You mention 5.5. If you are still on 5.5, you will first need to migrate to Exchange 2003 before you can install Exchange 2007 and then migrate to it. There is no direct 5.5 -> 2007 solution except maybe with some third party tool that I am not aware of. If you are referring to a clean install of a brand new email system (with no legacy email system to upgrade), *I* think the deployment is pretty straight forward. You would choose the "typical" deployment setting which installs the Mailbox server role, the Client Access Server role (OWA), and the Hub Transport server role (SMTP) all on the same box. It's up to you to create more databases beyond the default database, and to move stuff around to seperate disks (even the smallest Exchange system should not be 100% installed on a single hard drive). Most small businesses choose the "typical" deployment setting, and just forward port 443 (HTTPS) and 25 (SMTP) directly to their backend server. You might consider using ISA 2006 to sit in the middle of the firewall/router and your Exchange server, but most small busniesses don't want to justify the cost of another server and ISA 2006. Good luck! From personal experience of setting up a clean install of 2007 (and having never touched Exchange before in my life) I spent most my time researching and configuring autodiscover. The rest comes rather quickly in comparison.

Try this link on how to install the producthttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123895(EXCHG.80).aspx