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By Drew Nicholson, dnicholson@OutlookExchange.com

This article will consist of an ever growing list of tips having to do with basic Exchange Administration.

One very important thing to have is complete documentation of your Exchange Server. In addition to all of the documentation related to your operating system (hardware config, ip address, server name, domain name, service paks installed, etc.) there is documentation specific to Exchange that you will definitely want to know if you have to do a Disaster Recovery!
Documentation you should have includes:

The Exchange Server's role (general, dedicated Private store, dedicated Public store, bridgehead server)

Exchange Organization, Site name and Server name (the first two are case-sensitive!)

The version of Exchange Server, and a list of what service paks and hotfixes have been installed

Exchange server disks and drive letters in use, including:

Default Exchange Server location (usually C:\exchsrvr)
Private information store database
Public information store database
Information store transaction log files
Directory Database
Directory transaction log files
Message transfer agent, working directory, and log file locations

HINT! You can run the Exchange Server Performance Optimizer to find out where many of these items are located on your server. You can run the Performance Optimizer from the Exchange folder in START/PROGRAMS, or find perfwiz.exe on your server and run it directly.

Other information about your Exchange server to document are:

Exchange Connecters installed (site, X.400, directory replication connector, IMS, etc.) and connector configuration information

Configuration information on third-party gateways and enhancements

Storage Limits and Deleted Item Recovery Time

Other (this includes routing table configuration, Offline Address Book server, etc.)

In addition to the Server documentation, there is Organization documentation that you should have as well:

Custom Attributes and names

Csutomizations made to the site-level details templates

Changes in the Schema

Site messaging connector information, including how each site connects to other sites

Site addressing information (default SMTP, X.400, etc. addresses)

Changes made to the default site maintenance periods (routing recalculation, offline address book generation, storage warnings, etc.)

Having good documentation of your Exchange Server(s) will be vital to you in the future. If you have ever had to try and figure out the name, site name and org name of your environment from a log file, you know what I mean!

Back to my home page.

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