This webcast, featuring Exchange MVP Tony Redmond & Lawrence Garvin, discusses the pain of managing Exchange manually using PowerShell scripts and illuminates the requirement for automation in management. To this end, SolarWinds has developed a capability to more efficiently monitor on-premise Exchange environments, which is described and shown in detail during this webcast.

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New Tool for Automating Exchange
Management Tasks
4-9-14
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Webcast Logistics & Agenda
» Your hosts:
 Tony Redmond, Microsoft® Exchange MVP and Senior Contributing Editor for WindowsITPro.com
 Lawrence Garvin, SolarWinds® Head Geek & WSUS MVP
» Ask questions via chat!
» Agenda
 Administrative problems with Exchange™ Server
 PowerShell® is Key to Administration
 Automation is required for efficient visibility
 New Automation Product for Exchange admins – Server & Application Monitor
• Product capabilities
• Demo
 Q&A
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© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Administration problems with Exchange
» All versions of Exchange generate vast quantities of performance and other data
 The quantity of consumable and actionable data available to administrators grows as more
features are added to the product – Managed Availability is a great example
» It’s hard for humans make useful sense of all that information
» Traditionally Microsoft has provided poor reporting and monitoring features within
the core Exchange product
 Most companies depend on other Microsoft and third-party products to make sense of the fog of
data
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© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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The importance of PowerShell
» Embracing PowerShell was one of the most fundamental changes made to
Exchange over the last decade
 Exchange 2003 had no real automation capabilities
 Exchange 2013 is automated to run 100,000 servers in Office 365®
» PowerShell also enables automated gathering and filtering of important Exchange
data to enable better decisions by administrators
 Recognize what’s important
 Understand its importance
 React because it is important
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Why automation?
» Humans are great, but manual intervention and execution in anything is prone to
error and errors can lead to IT disasters
» You can manage Exchange servers manually, but complexity quickly grows as
mailboxes, databases, servers, queues, and transactions increase
» Automation enables information to be extracted and interpreted cleanly,
consistently, and efficiently
» Learn from the lessons of “the service”: automation drives better results at lower
costs with greater consistency
 If this approach works for tens of thousands of servers, why wouldn’t it work for you?
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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The cost of managing email is high, especially for large
organizations
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© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
» 49% of companies with greater than 5,000 mailboxes have 6 or more employees (FTEs)
managing email, while 61% of companies with greater than 50,000 mailboxes have 10
or more employees to manage email
30%
21%
21%
28%
AVERAGE FTES FOR MANAGING EMAIL
(COMPANIES >5,OOO MAILBOXES)
2 or fewer employees 3 to 5 6 to 9 10 or greater
69%
27%
3%1%
AVERAGE FTES FOR MANAGING EMAIL
(COMPANIES <5,000 MAILBOXES)
2 or fewer employees 3 to 5 6 to 9 10 or greater
Source: SolarWinds Email Management Survey, March 2014

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 Consolidated visibility to historical mailbox database usage (all
copies), regardless of multiple DAG transitions
 Replication status checks
 Quick views of dormant mailboxes and top mailbox offenders
and drill into individual Exchange user mailbox details for
troubleshooting
 Real-time view of logs, processes, services
 Monitor the end-user experience to discover patterns that
might lead to poor service with round trip tests (MAPI, etc.).
 Proactive alerting for related applications to include Lync®,
ActiveSync® connectivity, and Active Directory® performance.
 Server hardware health & virtual server performance for
multiple vendors
 Web based reports that can be scheduled and emailed.
 Agentless – quick time to deploy and maintain
Time is money! Save time with Server & Application Monitor
“Before trying the AppInsight for Exchange functionality, our limited staff
was not managing our 1,800 mailboxes and was spending up to 10 hours
a week performing administrative tasks and running reports directly
from Exchange,” said Alen Geopfarth, Senior Network Engineer for ICU
Medical. “With SolarWinds SAM, it’s much easier to find the top mailbox
offenders and actually have the information displayed clearly – we
expect to see a reduction of about 50 percent in time spent on these
tasks.”
© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Demo
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© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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Thank you!
» Learn more: www.solarwinds.com/SAM
» Try it free for 30 days or play around with the on-line demo
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© 2014 SOLARWINDS WORLDWIDE, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.