1 Introduction

Microsoft Exchange Server provides a rich set of interfaces with which messaging clients can interoperate. A messaging client can connect to a computer that is running Microsoft Exchange by using one or more of the available protocols and perform tasks by issuing requests to the server and processing server responses.

The technical requirements, limitations, dependencies, and Microsoft-specific protocol behavior of the protocols that are used in Microsoft Exchange are described by the Microsoft Exchange protocol documentation set. The documentation set can be broken down into functional groups as illustrated in the following diagram.

Figure 1: Organization of Microsoft Exchange protocol documents

For information about the protocols described by each of these documents, see section 2.2.