Chapter 10: Administration and Maintenance

Overview

Even after an Exchange environment is operational, it still requires a lot of work to keep everything running smoothly. As an administrator, it is your responsibility to monitor the status of the various components of your organization, perform a variety of daily administrative tasks, quickly spot problems in the system when they occur (or even before they occur), and fix those problems. It is also your responsibility to understand the tools used in performing all these tasks. Fortunately, Exchange Server 2003 handles a lot of monitoring, reporting, and repairing automatically. However, you still have the ability to control many of the parameters by which those automatic tasks function and, if the situation warrants , to perform various manual and offline management tasks.

This chapter covers a lot of ground. In previous chapters, you have been using System Manager to perform many of the tasks in Exchange. In this chapter, you ‚ ll take a closer look at this powerful utility. You will also learn about the following topics:

• Running snap-ins in the Microsoft Management Console

• Using various Windows and Exchange tools to monitor an Exchange server

• Managing message queues and tracking messages

• Using system and recipient policies

• Troubleshooting clients and servers