Wondering if anyone has any best practice tips for designing Exchange 2003
with users in different countries.
Main site is in UK with 4000 users, Exchange 2003 SP2, 3 backend (clustered
into 2 EVS), 2 front end, and 3 DC/GC
Want a new site in Hong Kong for 300 users.  The location for Hong Kong has
no IT staff.
The Hong Kong users will travel to USA and UK but will mainly be in Hong Kong.
Have 5MB dedicated connection from London to Hong Kong.

main question is should I have a mail store in Hong Kong or is the bandwidth
good enough to have front end servers in Hong Kong and the backend in UK.
Reason I ask this is that the HK location has no real IT staff and is hosted
in a data center.
The smtp address for the new users will be different to our UK users but I
suppose I can get around this using recipient policies.
I've been told that resiliance is not as important in HK so if a mailstore
in HK is required, that this would be standalone and not clustered.
So in HK can I just have a FE server and a DC/GC/DNS server?
If so can the DC be in the same AD site with a 5MB connection or would
replication traffic be too much that I would have to configure another site
and schedule replication.
If the distance is too much for a backend/frontend environment would the
following be the best solution.
new administraive group in my current exchange organisation
Assign new backend exchange server to this group for the hong kong users
(based in Hong Kong)
New AD site with a new DC/GC/DNS server (based in Hong Kong)
New front end server (based in Honk Kong)
New recipient policies applied to the Hong Kong users
new routing group connector pointing an appropriate SMTP server in Hong Kong
Appropriate MX records for new mailserver.

Sorry for all the questions but I hve never dealt with exchnge spllt across
countires.
PS..my manager does not want to deploy new technologies so would want to
stay with exchange 2003 rather than 2007 :-(

Thanks