Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007: Implementation and Administration

Chapter 14. Daily and Weekly Management of Exchange Server 2007

Best practices and recommendations for keeping Exchange Server running are some of the most popular topics in my classes and seminars. The advice to "leave Exchange alone" does not really seem to satisfy people, but that is an awfully good starting point.

Sure, there are some important daily and weekly tasks that you can (and should!) perform for your Exchange servers on both a daily and weekly basis. However, Exchange does not need to be "overadministered." Monitoring and ensuring recoverability are your most important daily tasks.

Probably the most important tasks that you perform on an Exchange server on a daily basis are to back it up and to ensure that you can adequately recover from a failure. While backup procedures and software will vary from one company (and vendor) to another, the fact that you are actually performing the backups and verifying that they are good makes you a diligent Exchange Server administrator.

Another important task involves just keeping an eye on the conditions and state of your Exchange server and making sure that nothing bad is about to happen. These tasks include monitoring queues, reviewing event logs, and confirming that the server is not running out of disk space.

The key to successful and efficient Exchange Server administration is finding out what tasks you should do and avoiding those that don't really add any value. In this chapter, I will cover the following topics:

• Important daily ...