Most system administrators are attuned to the effect of mailbox sizes, of bandwidth demands, and of storage requirements.

However, in the scheduling data of an Exchange server there's lurking all sorts of information that allows the astute Exchange Administrator a glimpse into the more direct running of the organization.

Exchange stores Scheduling messages as straight-forward emails. This includes all aspects of the meeting, owner, recurrence pattern, exceptions, guests, their status, etc. The following data was taken directly from a server, put into an Access database, and analyzed. It is typical of data we see in analyzing customers' Exchange installations (it has also been slightly modified to make it anonymous while preserving the character of the lessons we can learn from it).

Exchange does not by default grant a sys admin adequate privileges to read individual email or scheduling data. Thus, in order to gather this information a system administrator needs to grant himself "superuser" privileges. Note also that all of the information gathered below does not identify specific individuals (though it is possible you might want to). The most useful information to be immediately gained is the aggregate information of what's going on when people get together and how they do it.

In general, it's neither desirable nor ethical to be looking at specific meetings for users any more than it's desirable or ethical to be looking at specific email messages. The basic method of querying the Exchange store and aggregating the data makes it possible to give individual privacy but corporate or departmental accountability.

First diving the number of total Guests by the total number of Meetings tells us that the average meeting has 5.9 guests (usually this number varies between 4 and 6).

Given how important meetings are in corporate life, it's amazing how much these numbers can tell you. Assume that on average each of your employees is supposed to bring in $200 per hour in productivity. That means each 1-hour meeting at this company is costing 5.9 x $200 or $1180. Needless to say, the only person in a position to provide this number for planning purposes is the Exchange Administrator.

Note also that we have a total of 12,929 meetings for 200 user from 2001 onward. The average time users spend in meetings is left as an exercise to the reader.

This in itself starts to open up an entire world of questions you can now ask (and answer) -- what percentage of time are people in meetings in the organization? How often is the Sales Team in meetings (which you want) versus the Development Team (which you might not want)? How much are conference rooms and resources in use? Using the same querying techniques you can get at these results (probably for the first time).

Now let's take a look at the spectrum of users in the scheduling capabilities of Outlook. The following report calls out the top ten most scheduling intensive users, based on total number of meetings proposed, total number of appointments, and total number of guests in meetings.

Note that the top ten scheduling users (ranked by number of meetings) account for almost 20% of the total number of meetings that take place. This sample, taken from a 200 user Exchange installation means that 5% of the users account for almost 20% of the meetings that occur. This is not atypical.

Graphically it's a little easier to see what's happening:

This quantifies what your common sense experience tells you - that meetings tend to cluster around mid-morning (10:00 AM) and mid-afternoon (2:00 PM), with a break for lunch.

Similarly, the main day for meetings is Wednesday, with declining popularity towards the weekend.

In (almost) every data set we've ever seen Wednesday is the peak meeting day of the week, with the curve tailing off from there toward the weekend on either side.

Appointments skew slightly differently:

Notice that there is a HUGE spike at 8:00 AM, which is where people will tend to put major deliverables (e.g., Report due today) as opposed to in either the To-Do List.

Meetings tend to be a one-time only occurrence, with almost 90% of meetings scheduled once (note: this can include exceptions to recurring meetings). Of the recurring meetings, most (over 90%) have a finite end date, indicating that they are part of a project that has a definite end to it, rather than an on-going

This is an amazing amount of information that leverages the System Administrator's value within the organization and gives new tools to corporate management to evaluate how effectively the work force is using the tools that are designed to manage their time. On the whole it's amazing how we have not yet even really begun to mine the data that's contained in the Exchange store.