I  have worked at Microsoft for over 3 years now and have spent a lot of that time working on the Exchange Risk Assessment Program.  This is offered to Microsoft's Premier customers and is designed to assess the potential risks to a customers Exchange Organization.  It's a fantastic initiative and if followed correctly offers our customers a real chance to improve the efficiency, performance and security of their messaging infrastructure and ultimately increase uptime, reduce costs and improve the satisfaction of a customers messaging service.

Having completed not far off 100 of these risk assessments I thought it a good idea to share some of the experience I have gained.  Anyone running Exchange 2000\2003 Server should be able to run their own risk assessment in a couple of days; the aim being to produce a list of issues and the steps to resolution.

This is definitely not designed to replace the ExRAP as the official risk assessment covers a lot more than I can here but this health check will be a good place to start in my opinion.

I'll break this health check down into several parts as follows:

• The Tools  [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  The Tools']
• Operations [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  Part 1']
• General Administration  [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  Part 2']
• Security  [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  Part 3']
• Server Performance  [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  Part 4']
• Routing  [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  Part 5']
• Active Directory  [See 'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  Part 6']

There is not a lot of good information out on the Internet for non-premier customers about the ExRAP offered by Microsoft but I've included some links here....

• 'Exchange Configuration and Operations Issues Detected by ExRAP'
• 'From ExBPA to ExRAP'

And some other information here about Premier Services and what's on offer....

• 'Microsoft Premiers Services Support'
• 'Microsoft Service Product - Exchange Server 2003'

..'Run your own Exchange Server Health Check....  The Tools' to follow soon...