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Home > Two useful tools for documenting an Exchange Server installation |
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The Exchange BPA is an excellent troubleshooting tool. Use the Health Check option and export the informational output to HTML to gather some basic information to later place in your Exchange documentation. The BPA can be run from your Exchange servers or from a local workstation, whether you've downloaded the standalone BPA or installed it as part of the Exchange 2007 Management Tools. Note: In my example, I installed the Exchange BPA on one of the Exchange Servers in my lab. I began the process by running the BPA in Health Check mode. To do this, run the Exchange BPA tool [START -> RUN] and type in EXBPA. Choose Start a new Best Practices scan from the options menu. Make sure that the Health Check radio button is selected from the Select the type of scan group box. I've also checked off all the elements that I want to be included in the scan. I gave the scan a demonstration name, but you can use something more descriptive. I also chose the network speed of my Exchange servers. When that was completed, I chose the Start Scanning (Figure 1).
The BPA will then scan your environment (Figure 2).
When the scan is complete, click on View a report of the Best Practices Scan (Figure 3).
From the report screen, choose Informational items and then Export Report (Figure 4).
You'll be presented with a save dialog box. Make sure to save items as HTML (Figure 5).
This gives you an HTML-based report that you can include in your Exchange installation documentation (Figure 6).
You may want to include the following items from this report into your documentation:
Using the ExchDump tool in your documentation process ExchDump is a tool that's available for download as part of the Exchange resource kit. Even though it's been available since Exchange 2000, most of the functionality is still very useful when documenting an Exchange 2007 install. ExchDump is designed to take a read-only look at your Exchange-related Active Directory infrastructure and server configuration, including Internet Information Services (IIS). It then dumps this information into an HTML document that can be used for troubleshooting and documenting. After downloading ExchDump, extract it to a location on one of your Exchange servers. Open a command prompt and navigate to the directory where you placed the extracted files. Next, type the following command (Figure 7): ExchDump.exe /ALL /EXORG /Computer / V
Press the enter key and ExchDump will scan your infrastructure (Figure 8):
When the scan has completed, the program will have created XML and HTML files in the directory in which you initially placed the ExchDump program . If you open the HTML file, you'll find several details regarding your Exchange infrastructure, including permissions on objects within AD (Figure 9).
You can now translate some of this information into your documentation. For example, if you were documenting permissions on server objects, you could take some of the output from the ExchDump file and format it into a table, shown in Figure 10.
In terms of the overall look and feel of the document, I've found that this can present a challenge from a structuring point of view. Therefore, here is a sample template that you can modify for your own documentation. About the
Do you have comments on this tip? Let us know. Do you know a helpful Exchange Server, Microsoft Outlook or SharePoint tip, timesaver or workaround? Email the editors to talk about writing for SearchExchange.com.
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