Case Scenario Exercise

You are the Exchange Full Administrator for Fabrikam, Inc. Fabrikam employees use email extensively for both internal and external communication, and management regards an efficient e-mail organization as an essential part of the company's operation. You need to respond promptly to reports that e-mail messages are not being delivered in a timely fashion. Also, you need to design and implement a comprehensive monitoring strategy that identifies potential problems before they impinge on users and that ensures that performance does not degrade over time.

The users at Fabrikam are technically sophisticated and frequently check their mailbox statistics. Any discrepancies in these statistics are reported as errors. Fabrikam is growing, and you cannot keep up with your daily maintenance tasks. Management has permitted you to appoint an assistant, and you need to delegate some of your duties.

Management has asked you to address any problems that users have identified, to prepare a monitoring and maintenance schedule, and to submit a report indicating what tasks you intend to delegate.

• Requirement 1 You need to identify the tasks that you should perform on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and on demand. You also need to decide what tasks you can delegate.

• Requirement 2 You need to respond to user reports that e-mail is not being delivered at all, or is not being delivered in a timely fashion.

• Requirement 3 Your users' mailbox stores should return correct statistics and there should be no degradation in the performance of your Exchange databases over time. You need to check and repair database activity and to defragment databases as required.

Requirement 1

You need to decide what tasks should be delegated to your assistant, and you need to identify the tasks that need to be performed on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and on demand.

1. Which of the following Exchange Server 2003 maintenance tasks should you (or your assistant) perform on a daily basis, which on a weekly basis, and which on demand?

   1. Review antivirus logs.

   2. Check the integrity of information stores and repair them as necessary.

   3. Check the application log in Event Viewer for error and warning events.

   4. Review performance logs to identify trends.

   5. Review protocol logs.

   6. Check the available disk space on volumes that store Exchange 2003 databases.

   7. Check the Badmail folder. Monitor the application log in Event Viewer for warnings and errors.

   8. Defragment Exchange databases.

   9. Check mailbox limits.

2. You want to delegate responsibility for dealing with service failures and for gathering Exchange 2003 store statistics. Which specific daily monitoring tasks should you delegate to your assistant?

Requirement 2

You need to respond to e-mail delivery problems that users report to you.

1. Sean Alexander, an executive at Blue Yonder Airlines, has sent an e-mail to your chief executive officer (CEO). The message is not in your CEO's mailbox, nor is it in the Badmail folder. Sean has not received an NDR. Where should you look to find the message, and what action can you take to expedite delivery?

2. You receive a report from Don Hall that he is receiving NDRs when he sends email to Kim Akers. You know that Kim still works for Fabrikam and that her mailbox is not disabled. You ascertain that the e-mails sent did not have excessively large attachments. Other users report that they have no problems sending email to Kim. You suspect that Don is consistently misspelling Kim's username. How can you quickly check this?

Requirement 3

You need to repair any problems that occur due to Exchange store fragmentation or loss of integrity.

1. You are receiving reports from several users on one of your Exchange stores that the counter for unread messages does not accurately reflect the actual number of unread messages in their inboxes. You verify that the users do not have filters on their inboxes. What should you do next?

2. You suspect that an Exchange mailbox store has become fragmented and that there may also be integrity errors. You attempt to use the isinteg and eseutil command-line utilities, but they will not run for that store. What have you forgotten to do?