Earlier this year, Microsoft released an update to yet another tool designed to help the Exchange administrator maintain a fully functioning and reliable Exchange organization. The Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant (ExTRA) v1.1 complements the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) to provide extensive information on an Exchange installation.

ExTRA installs on Windows with the Microsoft.Net Framework 1.1 already present, including Exchange 2000 or 2003, though Microsoft does recommend keeping the analyzers separate from Exchange mailbox servers. On an Exchange 2007 server with the management components installed, the ExTRA functionality is incorporated into the management interface in the Toolbox section so installation is refused with the Exchange 2007 management console present.

ExTRA is more like a suite of analysis tools covering a variety of potential Exchange problem areas. As witnessed in Figure 1, ExTRA includes troubleshooters for performance, mail flow, database, and Exchange processes. Depending on the symptom, ExTRA can use a variety of sources and method for its analysis, including reading Active Directory Exchange configuration information, leveraging Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and retrieving information from logs like Message Tracking and Application Event logs.

Figure 1:
http://www.slipstick.com/emo/2007/i/Fig1_ExTRA_MainUI.PNG 

Performance Troubleshooter
The focus of performance analysis with this tool is client access. This is used when clients are experiencing connectivity issues, including the popup explaining that Outlook is retrieving data from Exchange. RPC connectivity is analyzed and recommended resolutions are presented based on the symptom selected for analysis, namely RPC performance problems for one or more Outlook clients. Reports from the troubleshooter can be exported to HTML, CSV, or XML for reporting or archiving.

Mail Flow Troubleshooter
There are several symptoms that ExTRA can focus on for mail flow analysis, including a couple specific to Exchange 2007. This tool can check queues and report on mail flow internal to the exchange organization as well as items arriving or leaving the Exchange org. These symptoms as taken from the Mail Flow Troubleshooter itself:

• Users are complaining about receiving non-delivery reports when they send messages.
• Messages coming from external senders over the Internet are delayed or are not received by some recipients.
• Messages that are destined for external recipients on the Internet are delayed or are not sent to some recipients.
• Messages are backing up in one or more queues on a server
• Users are reporting that messages are backing up in their Outbox (for Exchange Server 2007 only).
• Problems with Edge Server synchronization with Active Directory (for Exchange Server 2007 only).

This tool will provide a summary of the Exchange environment based on the Exchange server and global catalog server chosen for the scan, then report on the selected symptom from the list.

Database Troubleshooter
The database troubleshooter can retrieve database related events from the event logs of specific Exchange servers. This will summarize database issues as reported to the log, such as database mounting issues.

Exchange processes are failing
This tool can scan an Exchange server (or pulls the Exchange topology from Active Directory for the administrator to select servers to scan) and report on failure events. This provides a centralized means of viewing problems for all Exchange servers in an organization.

Overall, ExTRA complements ExBPA and together they provide an impressive analysis, troubleshooting and reporting toolset. They share the interface in the Toolbox section of the Exchange 2007 management components and both are available as separate downloads as well. Output reports have preset filtering categories allowing administrators to focus on ‘critical issues’ or review a ‘summary’ page.

For more information, see Microsoft Exchange Analyzers
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/bb288481.aspx

-- William Lefkovics

Christopher wants to know how he can track the respond time for emails. He needs to keep track of the time the email was sent, and then the time it was replied to. "Currently the only way I can see the reply time is by opening the message and looking at the infobar. Do you know how I can do this? So it will show in the inbox categories, and then I can export this to excel to create a report?"

Yes, you can do this.

The replied to time is an Extended MAPI property (PR_LAST_VERB_EXECUTION_TIME) but it’s not exposed in the Outlook interface. While you could use the modified time field, if you touch the message in a way that causes the last modified time to update it won’t reflect the replied to time. Fortunately it is possible to expose the time the message was replied to by creating and installing an Extension form configuration file.

Fortunately you don’t have to know anything about Extended MAPI or writing configuration files (or even know what they are) because Michal Bednarz of CodeTwo (and an Outlook MVP) has a CFG that exposes the last verb execution time. Additionally, the PR_LAST_VERB_EXECUTED tells you the type of last verb executed and Michal’s CFG exposes this value so you can see you what action you took. It has a 102 decimal value when the message was replied to, 103 when you replied to all and 104 if the message was forwarded.

Adding the form and fields to Outlook is easy: place the *.CFG into the same Office folder with the *.ICO files, by default, it’s found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\FORMS\[4 digit language ID] . (Change the Office version number to the correct one for your version.)

Once the file is in the correct folder:
1. Go to Tools, Options, Other, Advanced Options, Custom Forms, Manage Forms.
2. Click the Install button. Browse to the folder and choose the .CFG file to install it into your Personal Forms Library
3. Click OK and return to the main Outlook screen
4. Right-click on the Column row in your Inbox (or other any other folder) and choose "Field Chooser"
5. Scroll down and choose "Forms…"
6. Select Personal Forms, choose the Extension Form you added, then click Add
7. Drag the field to your column headings to see the values.

You will need to repeat the last 4 steps for each folder where you need to see the field.

Now you can see the date you replied to a message and 102, 103 or 104 indicate what you did, if you can remember what each value means.

Fortunately we can make the display to show labels instead of numbers as Outlook allows you to create custom fields based on a formula. To do that, follow these simple steps:

1. Right-click on the Column headings in your folder where you added the "Last Verb Exec Type" field and choose "Field Chooser"
2. In the Field Chooser, click New. Type Action (or any name you choose) as the field name, choose Formula as the Type.
3. Copy and paste the following formula in the Formula field:

IIf([Last Verb Exec Type] =102,"Replied to",IIf([Last Verb Exec Type]=103,"Replied to all",IIf([Last Verb Exec Type]=104,"Forwarded")))

Click OK and add the newly created Action field into your column headings. Remove the numerical "Last Verb Exec Type" field from the view, if desired.

If you'd like a friendlier name for the "Last Verb Exec Time" field, right click on the field name and choose Format columns. Enter a name such as Action Time.

While you can sort by the either of the Last Verb Exec fields, you can't sort by the custom formula field. For this reason, you might want to create a custom view that shows both the numerical Last Verb Exec Type field and the friendly label field so you can easily sort the messages and see the labels.

What other useful but hidden ExMAPI fields can you expose in your Outlook view? At this time the only publically available CFG’s I'm aware of are for the SenderID and SCL fields and the sender's email address field. SenderID and SCL are for use with Exchange 2003 or 2007 accounts only and require IMF to be enabled on the Exchange server. All Outlook users can add an email address field. Links to these files are at Adding Extended MAPI Fields to Outlook (http://www.slipstick.com/exs/customfields.htm).

Download Michal’s ‘Last Action’ CFG file
http://www.codetwo.com/downloads/CODETWO.LASTVERB.CFG 

Not only does Christopher need to view the replied to time, he also needs to use it in reports.

While he could export to Excel or a CSV file format, the export won't include the custom fields he needs. That's not really a problem though. He just needs to create a custom view showing the fields he wants to use in his report and then select the records, copy and paste into any application that accepts paste.

If the application uses OLE linking (such as Word), paste will embed the Email messages into the document. To avoid this, either use Edit, Paste Special, As Text or first paste into Notepad then copy it from Notepad. If you do this often, use a utility like PureText (http://stevemiller.net/puretext/) to convert the clipboard contents to plain text before pasting.

This technique works with all Outlook item types and most view layouts. I think its much faster than exporting, especially when you need specific fields or a subset of the data in a folder.

A surprisingly popular topic in the Microsoft newsgroups is the lack of a Week view in Outlook 2007's calendar. This is the view with 7 days shown in 2 columns and it seems users either used it all the time or never used it.

Among the comments:

"Is there a way to REMOVE the time grid on the left of the Outlook 2007 calendar?? I have just upgraded from Outlook 2002 and cannot seem to fit the same amount of information in the weekly view in the new 2007 format. I would rather just put a time in and have it appear EXACTLTY, instead of having it fit somewhere in the grid. I would rather have the 7 large squares to type stuff in (weekend being split), then waste my usable space with the time grid."

"Let me add my voice to those who HATE the time grid. The two-week view option suggested here is feasible, but much worse than the Outlook 2003 view. I would love a "classic view" option in 2007 which would let me see, at least my calendar, the old way."

"Can a fix be issued to remove the time grid since so many of us don't want it???"

This view was removed when the calendar overlay feature was added, in part because of difficulties in making it work with the overlays. At this time there is not a "fix" for the week view. The best workaround is dragging the cursor over two weeks in a navigation calendar. This gives you a 2 week view with larger grids than the monthly calendars, but you can't use this method to show just one week. You could use the Calendar Printing Assistant to print to an electronic document format or publish as an XPS file using the Week layout, but it’s not quite the same as having a Week view in Outlook. It's also not interactive.

I'm not expecting a fix from Microsoft for this, but you can increase the chances if you let them know you want the Week view by filing a support incident. See http://support.microsoft.com/gp/vista_supoffnew for more information on the support policy, which includes unlimited free support for retail Office/Outlook 2007 for the first 90 days after activation.

View a Two Week Calendar
http://www.slipstick.com/calendar/2wk_cal.htm

Calendar Printing Assistant
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA101687211033.aspx

The Outlook 2007 Primary Interop Assembly Reference is now available on MSDN. If your Visual Studio help options are set to either “Try local first, then online” or “Try online first, then local” and MSDN is one of your online help providers, pressing F1 on Outlook object model objects and members in Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio ‘Orcas’ will use the PIA reference.

Outlook 2007 PIA Documentation Online
http://blogs.msdn.com/rgregg/archive/2007/07/26/outlook-2007-pia-documentation-online.aspx 

Outlook 2007 Primary Interop Assembly Reference
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb187379.aspx