February 2010

Ok so this isn’t a new topic – but actually it IS.

Exchange Best Practices Analyzer or ExBPA updates quite regularly, and as such it’s something that the Exchange administrator should be running regularly.

The reasons are quite simple:

Owning Exchange is a moving target – Patches, Rollup Updates, etc change the software landscape and intorudce new functionality, and therefore new practices to manage.
Best Practices are a moving target – as weird as this sounds, were learning about mail all the time – how users USE mail changes and so does the load profile and what becomes best practice for mail servers
OS’s update and change all the time – patches, service packs, RTM/R2 etc
Security scenarios change all the time – this is an area were learning about CONSTANTLY
ExBPA keeps on improving – originally ExBPA handled one or two scenarios, now it handles upgrades, security scenarios, best practices across several versions, etc. Great value for a free tool!
The ExBPA folks keep on improving the tool as well as adding more and more scenarios. This means there’s a ton of intellectual property to glean from running the tool regularly and reading the reports.

And there’s more! However, ExBPA is something you may consider running soon if you haven’t looked at it for a while. You may be in for a pleasant surprise in terms of the extra value you may find in what you considered a one time use tool!

Happy Analyzing.