As an Exchange Admin, your users will often ask you if there is any way to recover a message that has been inadvertently deleted from their mailbox. Fortunately, Exchange 5.5 has a feature that allows you to do just this, although the standard configuration can be improved by a small amount of tweaking.
The visual complexity of modern email clients such as Outlook Express hides the simplicity of the underlying protocols that they use. If you know a few simple protocol commands it’s possible to send and receive emails via an Exchange Server with no GUI client whatsoever, if you have access to a telnet client.
Ontrack Data International has been specializing in data recovery since 1987. By releasing PowerControls, Ontrack have decided to extend their expertise to the Exchange community and the result is a product that could well be a lifesaver for many Exchange Administrators.
The traditional method of connecting an email user to their MS Exchange Server mailbox is to use MS Outlook. However, as more and more mobile users wish to access their mailboxes remotely, Exchange Administrators are often required to configure the connections of a wider variety of email clients, on a mixture of platforms.
As more and more people are discovering the usefulness of Outlook Web Access, or OWA for short, it is rapidly becoming one of the most popular add-ons for MS Exchange. It has to be said, however, that aesthetically, many people find it less than completely satisfactory. The yellow logon page in particular is a prime target for a visual overhaul.
When MS Exchange 5.5 was first introduced, having a permanent connection to the Internet was much less common than it is now. Consequently, Outlook Web Access (or OWA for short) was less likely to be part of the standard Exchange installation. Now that more and more Exchange Admins are discovering just how useful OWA can be, many are adding its functionality to their installations.
If you are responsible for maintaining the mailboxes of many users this can become rather a time-consuming task. Perhaps it would be more convenient for you and for them to allow your users to change their own GAL details. That way they don't need to call you to get it done, and you don't have to scribble it down and remember to do it.
MS Exchange provides a method, known as Directory Replication, of combining the email directories from a number of sites so that they can function as one.
While most Exchange admins are agreed on the necessity of performing regular backups, not all agree on which is the best way to do it. In fact, many Exchange newcomers are surprised at how strongly some admins feel regarding the superiority of one method compared to another.
Unsolicited Commercial Email, or spam (as it has become more commonly known) seems to be with us to stay, in much the same way as the junk mail that lands on our doormat each morning. Most of the time we happily delete the daily tide of junk email that arrives in our inbox without giving much thought as to where it might have come from, or how it made its way to us. The fact is that each message must have started its brief life on a server somewhere, and unfortunately spammers rarely go to the trouble of providing their own server hardware, preferring instead to use other people's. Quite possibly yours.
