One of the four core components of Microsoft Exchange Server. The Exchange directory service is responsible for maintaining the Exchange directory database of information concerning the organization’s sites, servers, services, and recipients.
This directory is based on the X.500 directory recommendations of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and is essentially a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)–compliant directory.
To synchronize the information among all servers, the directory service also replicates the directory information among all Exchange Server computers in an Exchange organization through directory replication.
This replication takes place automatically every five minutes among Exchange servers in the same site and when the administrator has scheduled it to occur between different sites. The Exchange directory service is implemented as a Microsoft Windows NT service and can be stopped, started, or paused like any other service. Errors that occur in the directory service are written to the application log on the Exchange server.
The directory service agent for Windows 2000 can integrate information maintained by the Exchange directory service with Active Directory in Windows 2000.