Product Reviews
Comprehensively Documenting Exchange
Ecora Config Auditor for Exchange provides details of your Exchange configuration, and changes thereto.
What problems lurk under the covers of your Exchange installation? If
you don't know, Ecora can find out for you. While not really an administration
tool, Ecora Configuration Auditor 2.0 for Exchange provides for the generation
of intelligent reports on your Exchange configuration. In one spot you
get a complete rundown of what you will find in Exchange System Manager
plus information from Active Directory.
Installation of this product is easy probably because of the elegance
in its simplicity of design and implementation. A reporting tool (which
is what I call it despite Ecora's insistence that it does much more than
that) does not need a lot of resources—maybe a database to store
report data, information on which reports are defined, and storage space
for the reports themselves. The only other piece that you will need is
a license from Ecora to unlock the features of Config Auditor that you
want to use.
Running this program, I started by connecting to both of the Exchange
5.5 servers in an organization, as well as an Exchange 2000 server. Ecora
will generate a current configuration report of all user accounts, distribution
lists/groups, and public folders, and other objects defined in your Exchange
organization. The report will include information from the directory as
well as items such as storage space used, connector configuration, and
the like. After generating the report you can view it from the Ecora user
interface or directly from a web browser. The browser-based interface
can be invoked from the MMC administration console for Config Auditor
and allows for easy navigation of report data in either the detailed long
form or more succinct short form.
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Ecora Config Auditor's browser interface allows for easy navigation
of configuration report information generated. (Click image to view larger version.)
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While being able to generate a full report of your Exchange configuration
any time you want is a nice feature, being able to also schedule the regular
generation of change reports, or to define a baseline configuration and
generate a baseline report against which to compare configurations is
the real power of Config Auditor. While this is still largely a reporting
function, the smarts introduced by Ecora in generating these reports make
the product worthwhile for administrators and consultants alike. If you
are a consultant, this tool can save many headaches trying to resolve
a client problem that they swore was there before you left—now you
can see that they may have changed something.
About the Author
Damir Bersinic, MCSE, MCDBA, MCSA, MCT, is an independent consultant, trainer and author.