Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool

Readme File

March 2005


Contents

Introduction

What's New in Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer v2.0

Frequently Asked Questions

Known Issues

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Introduction

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This Readme file for the Microsoft® Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer consists of three sections as follows.



What's New in Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer v2.0

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This section provides an overview of the new features and funtionality in the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer v2.0.

For customers who have deployed MOM to their Exchange servers, Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer can now be run automatically as part of the MOM agent. This enables MOM to alert configuration problems found by Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer through to the MOM console. This means that customers using MOM do not need to manually run the tool.

Details: Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer can be deployed locally to all Exchange servers in the organization. The MOM agent will run the command-line version of Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (this is ExBPACmd) as a task at regular intervals. The command-line tool collects and analyzes data from the local Exchange server and writes each triggered rule as an event to the Application log of the server. The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Management Pack for MOM 2005 will then find these events and send them to the MOM console.

Note   When run in this mode, the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 to be installed on each Exchange server. This software is pre-installed as part of the Exchange Server 2003 Setup program, but it is not installed with Exchange 2000 Server.

The complete tool, including rules and documentation, has been localized into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Cheinese simplified, Chinese traditional, and Korean.

There are new capabilities to look up domain name system records. Because Exchange server depends on DNS, Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer can make sure that all records have been published correctly.

Besides exporting the results of a scan in XML and HTML, the new version of the tool allows comma-separated value (CSV) format reports.

The command-line version of the tool has been updated to more closely align with its user interface counterpart. The command-line switches are now more intuitive, and it now supports automatic update checking.

In earlier versions of Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer, it was not possible to collect the global configuration data (such as the Exchange organization) without scanning every Exchange server in the topology. With this new version, scanning an individual server (or specified collection of servers) also collects and analyzes global configuration and Active Directory data.

Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer warns administrators about potential problems and best practices that are not being adhered to. Earlier versions of the tool would report both of these cases with a yellow warning triangle. A new ‘best practice’ category (indicated by a blue circular warning) has been implemented in the new release to help administrators prioritize the urgency of issues.

The tools can now take an Active Directory group object and expand the whole membership tree, including other child groups. This function is useful to verify that special Exchange groups have the correct membership assigned.

Make sure that Exchange databases are backed up regularly. A new function of the tool is to determine the last backup time for Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003 databases.

In security-sensitive environments, it is a good idea to lock down Active Directory permissions as tightly as possible. However, this can make troubleshooting more difficult. Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer has new capabilities to collect and analyze security structures. The rules for identifying permission related problems will be supplied in a future XML update for the tool.

The underlying data collection and rules processing engine now supports performance sampling and analysis. The rules for identifying performance issues will be in a future XML update for the tool.

The administrator can now instruct the tool to run unattended at set intervals. Through the user interface, you can set the frequency. Behind the scenes, Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer creates a new ‘Scheduled Task’ for the local workstation.

BPA tool Schedule Scan view

Following are descriptions of the controls.

As soon as scheduling is enabled, the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer can still be used to do independent runs without affecting the scheduled runs (one exception to this is the baseline options – if those are changed the change will also affect scheduled runs). The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer can also be used to view the results of the scheduled runs. The scheduled scan data files are stored in the same way manually run scan files are so they will appear in the select scan screen as they are created.

Baseline options are used to generate a report of certain properties that deviate from user-specified values. This screen will be shown if the Baseline scan type is selected from the scan options screen (a link on the scan options screen will take you there). This screen looks similar to this.

BPA tool Baseline Options view

Following are descriptions of the controls.



Frequently Asked Questions

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The questions and answers have been categorized as follows:


General

Configuration

Scanning

Reports

Command-Line Version (ExBPACmd.exe)





Known Issues

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This section describes issues known at the time of release and their workarounds for Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer. Some of these issues are scheduled to be fixed in a future release of the tool.


General

Configuration

Scanning

Reports





Copyright

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Information in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, is subject to change without notice. Unless otherwise noted, the example companies, organizations, products, domain names, e-mail addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted herein are fictitious, and no association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, place, or event is intended or should be inferred. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation.

Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft, Active Directory, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.