“About a year after releasing Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft rolled out a free, automated best practice tool to help IT get the most out of the e-mail server and its two predecessors — Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5.

“We’ve developed a tool that basically gives them automated guidance. It’s like a Microsoft engineer in a box,” says Warren Ashton, group product manager for the Exchange Server Business Group.

The Exchange Best Practices Analyzer Tool is designed to scan one or all of the Exchange servers in an environment, collect 1,200 data points from each server and compare their settings against a database of 800 best-practice rules. It will also be possible to use the Exchange BPA tool to compare the configuration of a group of servers against a baseline server in your environment that you know is set up properly.”