Thursday, June 24, 2010

Re: Exchange 2007 - management/maintenance workload

I have Exchange 2003 set up. I use Postini through my internet provider
which catches about 90% of the spam.

We have about 90 emails on it, so also small. We use it for shared
calendars, shared folders, shared distribution list (parents), and the
global address book (all the staff, teachers, admin). =20

Once set up, I have found it to be very easy to maintain. I have it set
to back up each night using Backup Exec. I have deleted mail set to
permanently delete after 15 days, so anyone that "accidentally" deletes
their deletes can still go in and get them using the web interface. In
three years, I have only had to go and restore a mailbox once (user
issue, not Exchange issue), and it was quick and easy to do.

I think the most important thing is deciding how you want to set it up.
What are mail limits you want to set for each user? How will shared
distribution lists be managed (who has access to add, delete, change)?
How will shared folders (if used) be maintained? =20

I am guessing that Exchange 2007 will be just as easy to maintain once
set up. =20

Renee Ramig
Seven Hills School

-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of JPDS Tech
Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2010 11:03 AM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Exchange 2007 - management/maintenance workload

We are a small school, with under 100 email accounts. We are
considering a
shift from POP3 to Exchange 2007 but I am concerned about adding a great
deal of administrative overhead. The proposed new set-up would be
Exchange
2007 running on (VMWare-virtualized) Server 2008; we would continue to
use
Postini to reduce our spam load. We're hoping to achieve universal
access
for staff and shared calendars and distribution lists. I also hope that
the
SIS described in the thread below will reduce our storage requirements.


I'm aware that Google Apps and Microsoft Live offer these things but I'm
specifically asking about Exchange 2007. One techie tells me that 2007
is
so stable that there is little maintenance work. Would I be taking on a
nightmare of administrative tasks? I am a one-person tech office.

With trepidation,

Dan Berger


-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for independent school educators
[mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of TJ Rainsford
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 3:01 PM
To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
Subject: Re: Public Folders Exchange 2003 and iPhones

Renee:

If only it were that simple :-)

In order to reclaim disk space and white space when users clean up
email,
you actually have to run a offline defrag of the Information Store in
Exchange. This is actually something that should be done on a regular
basis
as part of maintenance (the interval is dependent on the how big your
information stores are). It is a pretty straight forward task but must
necessarily be done after hours as it will take down any users who are
part
of the specific information store as long as the process is running.

Running regular offline defrags is a really good idea. Not only will it
clean up disk space, it will compress the information stores (and defrag
them) which will improve overall performance and keep the system happy.

Please note that this is NOT a disk defrag! In fact, running a disk
defragmentation process on the disk where your Exchange data resides is
a
fundamentally BAD idea (things will likely go BOOM in a really bad way).
And as with all major maintenance, make DARN sure you have a backup of
EVERYTHING (the OS, server system state, Exchange databases, etc) before
doing this.

TJ

TJ Rainsford
E: tjrainsford@gmail.com

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