Microsoft sells the Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit sepearately from the Exchange Server 2000 software. These powerful utilities may not be secret—but how many people actually know about them?

by Brien M. Posey of CrossNodes, an EarthWeb site [June 5, 2001]

It's no big secret that you can do a lot with Exchange Server 2000. However, most of the really good tools and utilities that exist for Exchange 2000 don't actually come with the server software. Rather, many of these tools are included in the Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit. In this article, I'll introduce you to the Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit, and point out some of my favorite tools.

The Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit
In case you're unfamiliar with the Exchange 2000 Server Resource Kit, it's a book published by Microsoft Press that comes bundled with a CD. The book provides some of the most detailed information available about the inner workings of Exchange 2000 Server. The CD contains a searchable version of the book's text, but more importantly, also includes a plethora of handy utilities, commonly referred to as Resource Kit Tools.

In this article we'll take a look at some of the most useful ones. A complete list of the tools bundled with the book can be found on Microsoft's Web site.

Simulation tools
One common issue that just about every administrator faces is trying to determine the impact of future growth upon the server. For example, you may need to know what will happen if you add 1000 extra users or run a certain application; or you may just wonder where your server's breaking point is. To help answer some of these questions, the resource kit contains a set of simulation tools that you can use to forecast the impact of future network growth.

One of these tools is called ESP, which stands for Exchange Stress and Performance. ESP's primary purpose is to allow the administrator to simulate client applications running on an Exchange 2000 Server.

A better-known tool that's even more useful is LoadSim—a tool that allows you to simulate user activity on your server. By doing so, you can judge the effect of adding users in the future. Let's use the example of adding 1000 new users. Based on the habits of your existing users, you could set LoadSim up to simulate 1000 users checking their E-mail, using public folders, etc., over several hours time. You could then measure the impact that the increased activity has on your server. See our more extensive coverage on the LoadSim tool.

Another utility that I particularly like is the Mailtest tool. The resource kit categorizes Mailtest as a simulation tool, but I've always thought of it as more of a diagnostic tool. The purpose is to verify that mail flow works. You can use Mailtest to test the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) queues, or the functionality of mail-related protocols such as SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4, just to name a few.

Security tool
Although Windows 2000 is designed to alert users that their passwords will soon expire, some client platforms are incapable of displaying these messages. Consequently, the users never know that their passwords are expiring and don't change them, and they eventually get locked out of the system. The Password Expiry Warning Application addresses this issue by e-mailing users a message indicating that their password will soon expire.

Client tools
One of the main ideas behind the design of Exchange 2000 is that it can piggyback on top of Windows 2000's Active Directory. As you may know, the Active Directory can contain a wealth of information for each user, such as contact information or information about the user's job title and department. Unfortunately, this information can frequently become outdated quickly because the few people who know how to update it either don't have time or simply don't care.

However, a Resource Kit tool called the GAL (Global Address List) Modify tool allows users to change their own information. Users are free to update information such as their address or phone numbers, but they can't change higher level information such as their department or title unless they happen to have the appropriate Domain Admin permissions.

Public folder tool
I particularly like the Public Folder Tree Information tool. This utility counts the number of messages in a folder, subfolder, or both. While this may not sound that useful at first, this tool is excellent for those times that you need to verify whether or not public folder replication is working properly. After all, who wants to manually count hundreds of messages on multiple servers, just to see if there are the same number of messages on each server?

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