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Comments on Exchange 2007 Admin Interface

I attended the Improved Exchange System Manager for Exchange “12” Technet Webcast on Tuesday and just had a couple notes and thoughts about the direction the interface is taking in Ex07.

I am absolutely, 100%, against the increased user management that has been put into ESM. It seems to me to be a regression to the days where Exchange maintained a separate directory.

One of the advantages of moving Exchange to AD for its directory service was that administration was performed from a single source for most low-level tasks. Using ADUC, the front-line and help desk personnel could perform the user Adds/Moves/Changes from a single console.

I would have like to seen ADUC extended to include additional Exchange information (like mailbox size, public folder administration, etc). Instead, we are falling back to having to having 2 MMC snap-ins loaded and to perform a task and will need to educate the administrators on when to use each console.

Take an instance of adding a new user. Today, we have one place. ADUC (or scripts for you advanced people). Through ADUC, the help desk folks follow a wizard that creates the user, mailbox, and away they go. To disconnect a user or mailbox, they can do that all through ADUC.

Now ESM can add users to AD, through a separate console and different wizard. Since PowerShell actually performs all the ESM tasks, now we have three interfaces to add a new user…to AD…and mail-enable that user. Which – in my thinking – should have nothing to do with Exchange administration.

One of the demonstrations was to quickly change the Department attribute of a whole bunch of mailboxes using PS. Ok, great. Now tell me why that is an Exchange admin’s problem? That is a field that should be updated by an identity management solution – maybe powered by PS commandlets for Active Directory.

If we wanted to add AD functionality to PowerShell, why go half-way providing what’s needed for Exchange to do modifications to AD and give us all the commandlets in PS to do AD administration? You know, sites, services, subnets, object manipulation, schema changes, the full enchilada. Then, on top of that, build the new ESM features – easier filtering, task-based layout, new wizards – and use that for a whole new ADUC management console.

Dare I say it, the perfect domain administration console? Well, part of the way there. Add SMS and some reporting features and we might have something awesome.

Moving on…

I think there was an over-emphasis in the presentation on the power of moving to the MONAD/PS platform for Exchange administration. Sure, this will make our lives much easier, and I’ve been a believer in this from the start. I am an avid user of PS already and use it for Exchange 2003 administration and reporting.

So maybe it is just me being ho-hum about it, and administration is *cool* with PS, but you’ll have to be more compelling in many other areas to make your business case for upgrading.

Oh, and add some tab completion for parameter values if you could before we get to a final version. At least we gained tab completion to parameters in RC1.

One final thing, I have to note Amanda, the presenter, for making her test mailboxes with NHL players and teams. Which begs the question, who is she rooting for in the Stanley Cup Playoffs?

Go Sharks.