This fact might come as a surprise if you work in a marketing department, but no out-of-the-box product is a perfect fit for customer problems. The base functionality of products, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, that are stuffed full of features, can provide an 80 percent to 90 percent match for your requirements. Bridging the gap to get as close as possible to a 100 percent fit is the task of system integrators (external or internal), and tools such as the Exchange Resource Kit (ERK) are invaluable aids to that end. This article will review some of the newly reissued resource kit and describe some of the tools.
Resource and Development Kits
Resource kits are different from software development kits (SDKs). An SDK typically illustrates how best to use the APIs that a product is built on. SDKs include many different programming examples, all with source code that you can use as a project base. Looking through source code is a great way to learn an API, far better than scanning a manual or book.
A resource kit is not about selected pieces of source code that you can use as learning aids or project building blocks. Instead, a resource kit consists of add-on software components that you can use to enhance product deployment. In addition, resource kits often include documentation that provides insight on a product's internal workings.
Where Does the ERK Come From?
Microsoft's development philosophy is feature-driven, a legacy of the competitive environment generated in the race to create the world's best spreadsheet, word processor, and other personal productivity tools. Features appear and disappear as a product evolves and a new version goes to manufacturing. Features discarded along the way sometimes appear as standalone tools in a resource kit.
The tools on the ERK come from a variety of sources. The first and most numerous set of tools comes from engineers working in the Exchange development group. You can regard these tools as features that might end up in the product one day. The preview pane extension (PPE, or TRIPANE) is a good example. The PPE displays the first couple of lines from the currently selected message in a separate pane within the Exchange client. The PPE first appeared in the Exchange 4.0 resource kit. The Exchange client, even in 5.0, does not offer a preview pane as part of its standard functionality, but the Outlook client offers similar functionality as one of its standard views (a full-fledged PPE is also available for Outlook from Microsoft's Web site).
The second major group of ERK tools is a set of programs Microsoft personnel wrote to solve problems that arose during specific deployments. Some of the tools are a result of experience gained in Microsoft's internal deployment of Exchange (35,000 mailboxes worldwide).
The final set of tools comes from customers and are utilities that have proved useful. Microsoft gives no quality guarantee. Use ERK tools at your own risk. Don't expect to call Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) if something goes wrong and receive a sympathetic reception. Although the ERK is unsupported, the tools undergo a reasonable amount of testing before Microsoft includes them in the kit.
Microsoft PSS will accept bug reports (but will not guarantee fixes) and feed them back to the development team. You can mail directly to the development team at rkinput@microsoft.com. Remember to provide full details of the environment you encountered bugs under.
Because Microsoft provides the ERK as is, expect to spend some time getting to know the tools before you attempt to use them in anything close to a production environment. Also, if you're running Exchange in a multilanguage environment, be aware that the ERK makes no claim to be language-sensitive. Everything will work with English-language servers and clients, but you're on your own if you use anything else.
Versions of the ERK
The ERK first appeared shortly after Exchange 4.0 shipped. The ERK's contents weren't particularly startling, which is perhaps a reflection of the immature state of Exchange development. Remember that only in the last year has Exchange been exposed to the trials and tribulations of production environments across hundreds of different customers.
Knowledge about Exchange, both good and bad points, has grown enormously in the past year. Exchange 5.0 addresses many of the bad points. (For an overview of Exchange 5.0, see "Microsoft Exchange Server 5.0 Smoothes the Rough Edges," April 1997.) But, we'll always have things to improve. Exchange, for instance, has been criticized for its lack of administration tools that are immediately suitable for global deployments.
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