Exchange 2007 SysMgmt Team blog posts roundup

Weekend reading

subject: exchange — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 19:50:28 GMT

Palm Brings Microsoft's Direct Push Technology to Palm OS Based Treo Smartphones Microsoft Keeps the

re: Exchange 2007 SysMgmt Team blog posts roundup

Michael — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:37:45 GMT

I apologize if this isn't place to ask but you seem to be a great resource. I'm an Infrastructure guy at our company. So with all the Exchange '07, Office '07 & Vista going on now. I'm trying to get ramped up on Vista to make a recommendation to our Board of Diretors on whether we should jump or not. I'm using Vista Business with Office fine and all, seems pretty smooth BUT none of any of my Admin tools work. I finally got the basic Admin tools loaded by doing a hack to re-register everything.

Unfortunately, Exchange 2003 is left out in the cold. No one seems to have a fix for it. I am hoping that you know of something or a site that has it posted.

I am simply blown away at Microsoft's .... attitude about this. I've gotten, "Well, upgrade to 2007 then." Sure, get me an Enterprise and a couple Standard Server licenses plus a couple hundred CAL's, no problem.

Sorry to vent but we've been told over and over again that this is the most tested and solid version of Windows ever but it is looking more like Windows ME.

I figured if anyone knew how to make the 2003 tools work in Vista, it'd be here.

Thanks,

Michael

mshutts@midlandschoice.com

re: Exchange 2007 SysMgmt Team blog posts roundup

evand — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 04:53:53 GMT

Hi Michael - unfortunately I don't have the answer you want to hear. Exchange 2003 management tools aren't supported (and can't be installed) in Windows Vista. I suppose this is primarily because Exchange 2003 came out 4 years ago and I don't know that there's any service pack in sight to provide this support.

Upgrade to 2007 tools isn't really a solution in some cases, as 2007 management tools won't provide 100% coverage for things you may need to manage on your 2003 servers (X400 connectors, etc). Not sure why someone would have been suggesting this route. The better answer is probably to do one of these two:

1) Use Terminal Services admin sessions to connect directly to the Exchange servers and do management there.

2) Use VPC to host an XP Pro image you can run when needed (at your desktop) to do the management as "admin-only" configuration.