Exchange Messaging Outlook
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Greetings! Welcome to Vol. 7, No. 17, 6 Feb 2003, of Exchange Messaging Outlook, a biweekly newsletter about Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. Today's highlights:
Regular features:
How large is your Exchange installation? 30 mailboxes? 300? 3,000? 300,000? With the announcement this week of the availability of the Microsoft Solution for High Volume Exchange (HVE) at http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/highvolumeexchange/, Microsoft envisions service providers with multiple millions of mailboxes. Microsoft says the heart of the solution is a detailed architecture and best practices guide that shows how to build and manage a highly scalable Exchange data center with a minimum of 50,000 mailboxes. Microsoft is pushing HVE as a way ISPs can provide more than basic mail services, especially when combined with broadband access service. The HVE package includes a customizable knowledgebase, an automated provisioning component, and monitoring tools, based on Microsoft Operations Manager, that can analyze mail flow statistics, logon failures, and other service problems. Microsoft Exchange Usage Reporting and Analysis As organizations' dependence on email continues to grow, gauging mail server health becomes an increasingly key activity for administrators. EMO asked Outlook MVP Neo, who works with Exchange as well as Outlook, for his thoughts on Exchange monitoring techniques and tools. Neo writes: Email and messaging are the lifeblood of any modern business. Outages and system neglect can bring an organization to a standstill and raise operational costs due to a loss of productivity and extra hours spent in administration. Without regular system maintenance or check-ups, Microsoft Exchange servers can suffer from problems ranging from severe congestion to outages. In order to make better resource decisions and minimize costs, Exchange administrators and IT managers should analyze Microsoft Exchange data in order to deliver proactive business-critical decisions on everything from hardware/software capacity planning to maintaining Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The reality, though, is that many administrators don't have the time to manually sift through Exchange logs in order to gather facts about their sites. Instead they may rely on a "guesstimate" or industry standard numbers. Wouldn't it be nice if the log data could be transformed into easy-to-use statistical reports? A number of such reporting tools exist. My experience is with Quest Software's MessageStats (http://www.quest.com/messagestats/) and Promodag (http://www.promodag.com/). MessageStats and Promodag are similar products that produce statistical reports from information in the Microsoft Exchange server tracking logs and the Microsoft Exchange Global Address List, storing the data in a SQL database so that it can be used at a later time. Where the two differ is how they present the reports to the user. MessageStats is a purely web-based reporting tool, while Promodag uses the Crystal Reports engine. Each product comes with a good set of canned reports that cover things like mailbox size, time required to deliver messages, message size, message count, top senders and receivers, and top Internet domains your users send and receive messages from. This information is invaluable when making decisions on when to increase the size of link between sites, how to group departments, when to add an Internet mail connector, how to charge back costs based on message count or traffic volume, or whether or not the IT department is meeting its SLA that requires items to be delivered in a timely manner. In addition to the two products that Neo mentioned, many other mail monitoring and analysis tools for Exchange are available. For an introduction to the monitoring tool in Exchange 2000, see http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/The_Exchange_Monitoring_and_Status_Tool.html Besides MessageStats, Quest Software offers Spotlight on Exchange for a real-time, graphical display of mail flow, and 2MA, a monitoring and alerting tool. Others include:
Have Exchange monitoring tools helped you make the right decision or solved a particular problem in your organization? Drop us a line at emo@slipstick.com if you'd like to share your story with other EMO readers. The details of Microsoft CRM have been a closely held secret for months, with testers drawn from the ranks of Microsoft partners. If you're curious about this new customer relationship management product that has some Outlook integration, you might want to attend one of the free launch events Feb. 19 - Mar. 7 in 18 U.S. cities. What I'm waiting to see is what kind of applications emerge with MSCRM integration, since the architecture, exposed as XML web services, definitely lends itself to making connections with other applications. One such application is ManagePoint, which adds an outward-facing, web-based portal to MSCRM, so that customers can have direct access to service requests and other data. You can register for the MSCRM launch events at the ManagePoint site (http://www.managepoint.com/events/) or at other web sites for selected MSCRM partners. Exchange 2003 Technology Changes With the availability of a public beta of Exchange 2003, due for release later this year, Microsoft is listing changes that developers will want to note at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/etb2dp/mini_ti/_e2k3_welcome.asp. Chief among them is elimination of the M: drive mapping to the Exchange server. While this feature allowed file system access to Exchange data, it also caused problems when organizations allowed anti-virus software or other utilities access to that drive. Removal of the M: drive mapping also means that FrontPage Server Extensions will not be supported on Exchange 2003. Other techniques that won't make the transition from Exchange 2000 to the next version include the SQL Create Index function and various schema properties related to versioning. The Exchange Instant Messaging feature will move from Exchange to the new Real-Time Communications (RTC) Server. According to eWeek (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,847517,00.asp), a new Real-Time Collaboration group at Microsoft is also handling Exchange Conferencing Server and the recently announced acquisition of the PlaceWare web conferencing provider, which Microsoft has used for many of its recent webcasts. Free AutoAccept Sink for Exchange 2000 Most Exchange administrators who have set up resource calendars are probably familiar with the "autoaccept" script from Microsoft TechNet and the free AutoAccept Utilities from http://www.exchangecode.com. Both provide support for booking conference rooms and other resources on Exchange 5.5, especially for clients prior to Outlook 2000. Exchange 2000 now has its own autoaccept utility, using the faster and more reliable event sink technology. The new tool is available at http://autoaccept-sink.sourceforge.net/ as an open-source project and has been tested not just on Exchange 2000 but also on the recently released Exchange Server 2003 Beta 2. The developers have been using it inside their own company for more than a year and plan to continue enhancing it. Programming contributions and feature suggestions are welcome. |
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New Utilities |
AMPLIFI REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE SERVER http://www.eizel.com/ Server delivers remote access to Exchange mailboxes, corporate intranet, and other corporate data to a variety of mobile devices. Condenses large-format documents for small-format displays. Displays content from word processing documents even if the mobile device does not run a corresponding application. Users can create short canned responses for use with email. AUTOACCEPT SINK FOR EXCHANGE EXALERT FOR MESSENGER INOX MAPIGEN! PLUS PACK 5.5 FOR OUTLOOK WEB ACCESS SPELLCHECKER FOR OWA WSREPEAT APPOINTMENT |
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Updated utilities |
None in the past two weeks. | ||
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Other new resources |
XADM TROUBLESHOOT OFFLINE ADDRESS BOOK DOWNLOAD ISSUES http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811870 How to use the Mdbvu32.exe utility to locate and perform basic troubleshooting on the Offline Address Book for Outlook users connecting to Exchange 2000 or 5.5. (The correct KB article number is 811870, not 1870; The Yahoo! Groups mailer may mess up the URL above.) |
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More Information |
Click here to subscribe to the Exchange Messaging Outlook newsletter. Exchange Messaging Outlook Newsletter back issues ISSN 1523-7990 |
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Updated Apr 11 2009
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