Customer Solution Case Study
/ Aeronautics Manufacturer Reduces Help Desk Calls with Exchange Server Analysis Tool
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Precision Aerostructures provides manufacturing capabilities in the aerospace industry. It employs 350 workers at its facilities in Wellington, Kansas.
Business Situation
Meeting organizers were unable to see the free/busy information of company resources on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, preventing them from knowing when conference rooms were available.
Solution
The company’s network administrator ran the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool. With it, he identified the source of the problem and corrected it in less than a day.
Benefits
Faster troubleshooting
Fewer help desk calls
Better system performance
More effective spam filtering / “The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer is an awesome tool, one of my favorites. I’m amazed that you can download it for free.”
Sam Cochran, Network Administrator, Precision Aerostructures
Precision Aerostructures of Wellington, Kansas, provides manufacturing, subassembly, and component kitting capabilities for airplane fuselage and wing structures. Scheduling conflicts disrupted business when employees could no longer view conference room availability in their Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 meeting requests. After weeks of troubleshooting, the network administrator ran the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool. The detailed information it provided aboutthe company’s Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 deployment enabled him to quickly identify the source of the problem and correct it. Using the greater visibility into Exchange Server 2003 that the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer makes possible, he made improvements to system performance that resulted in 25 percent fewer Exchange Server–related help desk calls and more effective spam filtering.
Situation
Precision Aerostructures in Wellington, Kansas, provides state-of-the-art sheet metal manufacturing, subassembly, and component kitting capabilities for large, complex airplane fuselage and wing structures. Founded in 1951 as Welco Corporation to produce machined parts for military aerospace contractors in Wichita and St. Louis, Precision Aerostructures now has 350 employees at its two Wellington facilities. In August 2005, the company was acquired by TECT Corporation. Following a planned integration period, the Wellington facilities will become part of the TECT Aerospace business unit.
Precision Aerostructures employees rely heavily on e-mail, calendaring, and resource scheduling through Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 communication and collaboration server. Sam Cochran, Network Administrator at Precision Aerostructures, says, “Our company is very e-mail oriented. We use it to communicate with each other and with our customers more than we use the telephone.” Cochran adds that employees exclusively use the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client to schedule meetings and to book the company’s five conference rooms.
When attempting to book a conference room, Cochran noticed that the room’s free/busy information no longer appeared in his Outlook meeting request. Normally, users are able to see at a glance when the people and resources they are inviting to a meeting are available. That information was visible for the people he was inviting, but the space next to the conference room’s entry on the meeting request was blank. There was no way to tell whether the room had already been reserved, and if so, when.
When Cochran began to troubleshoot the problem, he discovered that the issue extended to all of the conference room resource accounts in Exchange Server 2003. Also, it didn’t matter which user in the company was creating the meeting request—none of the system’s users could see the free/busy information for any resource, not even the administrative account for the company network. Cochran then created a new resource account on the server running Exchange Server, as well as a new user. The problem occurred even with the new accounts.
Cochran tried a number of approaches to fix the problem:
Verifying that the information did exist in the calendars for the resource accounts
Changing the permissions on the resource mailboxes
Erasing and re-creating the free/busy information on the resource mailboxes using the /CleanFreeBusycommand
None of these approaches fixed the problem. In the meantime, the company was feeling the effect of users’ inability to see when resources were available. Conference rooms were being double-booked, and productivity fell as employees were forced to locate other employees to determine which rooms were booked and by whom. The company had to devise new paper-based resource scheduling processes to work around the problem, and it needed to ensure that all employees were aware of these new scheduling processes. Managers were forced to spend valuable time resolving scheduling conflicts to everyone's satisfaction.
Solution
Following a suggestion made by a Microsoft support technician, Cochran ran the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool on his Exchange Server 2003 environment. The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer automatically examines an Exchange Server deployment and determines if its configuration is set according to Microsoft best practices. Administrators can run the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer against an entire Exchange Server deployment, a specific server, or a set of servers.
The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer can analyze:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server
Microsoft Exchange Server version 5.5, when it is part of a mixed-mode topology
After it analyzed the system’s configuration, the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer reported a critical error: “The site folder cannot be found.” Cochran realized that this was the cause of the free/busy problems he’d observed. He followed a link in the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer report to an entry in the Microsoft technical support database that outlined a series of steps to resolve this issue.
As he applied the recommended fix to his server, Cochran began to see why the problem had occurred. When the company migrated from Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003 eight months before, the siteFolderServer attribute was not replicated correctly from the original Exchange 5.5 site to the upgraded administrative group. The attribute pointed to an incorrect Exchange Server 2003 computer as being the public folder server for the administrative group.
To correct the problem, Cochran copied the distinguishedName attribute of the public folder store and pasted it into the siteFolderServer attribute of the administrative group. Cochran then restarted the information store service. After that, the free/busy information for the company’s resource accounts was once again visible in meeting requests.
Benefits
After the free/busy problem was resolved, Cochran began manually running the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer daily on the company’s Exchange Server 2003 server, and making adjustments to the server’s configuration based on the results the tool provided. Gradually he reduced the schedule to once a week. Cochran reports that the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer helps him troubleshoot his company’s messaging systems faster, so that he now receives fewer support calls concerning Exchange Server 2003. Users at Precision Aerostructures have reliable access to the Exchange Server 2003 data they need to conduct business efficiently, and their mailboxes are safeguarded against spam e-mail with the latest Exchange Intelligent Message Filter updates.
Faster Troubleshooting
With the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer, Cochran can resolve a difficult network issue much faster than he could have otherwise. Given enough time, he may have eventually discovered the discrepancy between the two data attributes that caused the problem; but that amount of time is a luxury few network administrators can afford in a company full of busy users who rely heavily on Exchange Server 2003 to do their jobs.
“I spent two weeks trying to figure the problem out myself. It was a real nightmare,” Cochran says. “After I ran the Analyzer, I was able to fix the problem in less than a day.”
Cochran explains that the amount and the accuracy of the information that the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer provides, including links to relevant knowledge base articles, is what makes this efficient troubleshooting possible. “I can now resolve about 95 percent of our Exchange Server–related issuesusing only the information I get from the Analyzer,” says Cochran. “It does a pretty darn good job.”
Fewer Help Desk Calls
Cochran reports that the improvements he’s made to the company’s messaging environment based on information from the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer has greatly increased its stability. He estimates that since he began running the Analyzer and acting on its findings, the number of calls he receives about Exchange Server 2003 has dropped by 25 percent.
Better Performance
The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer has helped Cochran improve the performance of Exchange Server 2003. For example, many users at Precision Aerostructures had experienced an ongoing issue with delayed e-mail. Often an e-mail message sent internally would take up to a minute and a half to appear in the recipient’s inbox. Cochran used the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer to analyze the mail server configuration and discover what caused this delay. The resulting reportsuggested that Cochran change the parameters in an initialization file on the server in order to allocate more memory to Exchange Server 2003. When Cochran made this adjustment, the problem of messages hanging in the queues disappeared. E-mail messages that formerly took a minute and a half to deliver now took only two or three seconds.
More Effective Spam Filtering
Cochran reports that one of the most useful aspects of the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer is that it notifies him of new software updates. Cochran finds that this is a tremendous help in keeping spam e-mail messages out of users’ mailboxes. The Analyzer informs Cochran whenever updates to the Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter are available to download, so he’s able to deploy them more frequently. As a result, the number of spam messages blocked by the Intelligent Message Filter has almost doubled since Cochran began using the Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer.
“Until now, it was hard to know exactly what was going on in our messaging systems,” says Cochran. “Now I can see at a glance how Exchange Server 2003 is performing and what problems may be out there. The Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer is an awesome tool, one of my favorites. I’m amazed that you can download it for free.”
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