Last month, in "The Exchange Best Practices Analyzer," InstantDoc ID 44793, Paul Robichaux explained how to obtain and use Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA), a Microsoft tool that scans Exchange servers and reports on numerous settings so that you can optimize your Exchange configuration. Here, I continue the discussion by describing the ExBPA architecture and the mechanism by which ExBPA maintains and updates its rules and configuration data.
Why ExBPA?
ExBPA's roots can be traced to a couple of "unofficial" Microsoft tools that have been available for some time: ExConfig (which provides details about Exchange configuration changes on servers) and ExDiag (which reports about Exchange configuration and topology throughout an organization). Microsoft defines ExBPA as a diagnostic tool that gathers configuration information about an Exchange organization, performs specific tests against the organization's configuration, compares the test results against a baseline of best practices, and reports its findings. You can use ExBPA to perform a health check against an organization, identify settings that have been changed from the default, highlight less-than-optimal configuration settings, and compare servers against a baseline. ExBPA compares settings on Exchange systems with Microsoft-recommended best practices for configuration and can thus identify potential problems in an Exchange organization. Of course, a health-check tool that compares real-life servers against a set of rules is only as useful and valid as the rules and configuration data that are built into the tool; furthermore, best practices don't materialize overnight but instead develop over time. Therefore, Microsoft has designed ExBPA so that it checks for new rules and configuration data regularly (by default, every time ExBPA is started). . . .
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