Hmm, it is automatic, sort of. Thing is, if you just do a Restart of the server, it will try and shut all the services down anyway. Because of all the dependencies, though, it's less efficient than stopping the services in the order of the dependencies. Backas' instructions don't really buy you much advantage, as stopping the SA will forcefully stop all the other services as well - just like a Restart or Shutdown does. Better to stop them in the right order, one at a time, then you don't get any resource conflicts or other transient problems. For the 4 'core' services, think of MIDS - that's the order to shut them down in (MTA first, SA last). When (if) restarting them manually, do it in reverse order (SA first, MTA last). If you're running other services on any of your servers (Fax, IMS, Mailbox Manager etc) then just work out where they sit in the dependency chain and slot them right in.