When I work with clients on Exchange upgrades/migrations, I go through a standard list of questions to get their current state environment.  These questions are important in terms of appropriately sizing a messaging environment, and very often the clients end up estimating numbers because they don’t have any empirical data to work with.  Enter Quest and their MessageStats software.

MessageStats aggregates Exchange data and provides easy to use reports at the click of a button.  A few of the reports available can be seen in the Report List image.  Many of the current state assessment questions can be easily answered with these stock reports.  Want to know average message size or how many messages are sent/received per day?  One click.  Want to know top senders and/or receivers?  I can provide a graph and specific details easily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above and beyond the stock reports is the ability to create my own meaningful reports for “at a glance” environment reporting and even provide some internal numbers to allow for financial assessments.  For a per-mailbox cost, this tool pays for itself in the amount of effort it saves (and how good it makes me look when management asks questions about Exchange).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I recommend this tool to every client I work with, and offer to set up the free 90-day demo environment to show them how it is effective and easy to use.  It can be used for Exchange 2007/2010 and/or Exchange Online (Office 365).  There are additional reporting packs not only for OWA, but also for OCS 2007/Lync 2010 and a variety of other Exchange-integrated applications.  Project Leadership Associates is a Quest partner and can assist with not only MessageStats deployments, but also any of their other tools used for managing a messaging solution.

http://www.quest.com/messagestats/

 

 

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