Over the years I’ve gathered a list of tools that I use to help me with troubleshooting the issues or to do certain tasks I need to accomplish with Exchange. I’ve included a short list of some of the more popular tools I’ve used:
Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool 2.0 – brand new tool that can help you troubleshoot Outlook profile issues and according to Microsoft it “provides a detailed report of your current Outlook profile and mailbox. This report includes many parameters about your profile, and it highlights any known problems that are found in your profile or mailbox. For any problems that are listed in the report, you are provided a link to a Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article that describes a possible fix for the problem.”
Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer – One of the first tools you should learn. Run this frequently for your production servers. Run it before a migration and after a migration. useful as aninformation gathering tool.
Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell (Release Candidate) – Great tool for finding public PowerShell scripts. This application “helps scripters find Windows PowerShell scripts, snippets, modules, and how-to guidance in online repositories such as the TechNet Script Center Repository, PoshCode, local or network file systems and Bing Search Repository”.
Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer – This is a useful tool for analyzer your Exchange environment. Whether you just need to create some documentation or gather information for an upgrade this tool provides in-depth information on your Exchange environment. “The Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer tool lets administrators collect estimated statistical information from a single mailbox store or across an Exchange Server organization.”
Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer – great for troubleshooting remote connectivity issues from OWA, to ActiveSync to Outlook Anywhere. See here for more information – http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/03/25/3407129.aspx.
Microsoft Exchange Pre-Deployment Analyzer – I’ve used this tool in the past to help with the upgrade of Exchange to Exchange 2010. According to Microsoft, the tool “performs an overall topology readiness scan of your environment and provides you with a list of decisions that need to be made before you deploy Exchange Server 2010.”
PST Capture Tool – “Microsoft Exchange PST Capture allows you to search for PST files on computers in your organization and then import those files to mailboxes in your organization. PST Capture works with both on-premises Exchange servers and Exchange Online.”
Log Parser Studio – Great tool for analyzer the various logs in Exchange. Think of this tool as a front end for the Log Parser program you may have already been using for log analysis.
PowerGUI with its plugins for Exchange and AD – another repository of scripts in an easy to use GUI format.
SMTPDiag – I use this on an almost daily basis to troubleshoot mail flow issues for clients. Simple to use and provides plenty of detail for troubleshooting.
There are plenty of other tools, scripts and other devices I’ve used over time, but the above ones are the ones I turn to the most.
While researching links for all the above tools, I ran across this post:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/990.exchange-server-tools.aspx
