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Exchange Monitoring & Reporting at Leeds Metropolitan University
Having made their way through the MSExchange.org list of monitoring solutions and evaluated several products, Steve Kilburn, Infrastructure Consultant for Leeds MET explains why only Mailscape™ ticked all the boxes.
Leeds Metropolitan University is one of the largest and most popular Universities in the UK, with over 29,000 students and 3,000 staff. Whilst students use an online email service, Microsoft Exchange remains the backbone of the internal messaging environment.
Having recently migrated to Exchange 2010 (from Exchange 2003), the University’s IT team quickly found themselves managing a much more complex environment and consequently wanted to take proactive measures to keep a close eye on the new environment.
The team looked to MS Exchange.org for recommendations, as Steve Kilburn , Infrastructure Consultant for Leeds MET explains:
Having made our way through the MSExchange.org list of monitoring solutions and evaluated several products, only Mailscape ticked all the boxes. It was unique in its breadth of coverage across monitoring and reporting, and is a complete packaged solution.
As a small team managing the ever increasing demands on IT within the University, Steve has rolled out the Mailscape dashboard to each member of the core IT team who use it daily to monitor Exchange, troubleshoot any issues and take any preventative actions when needed.
Leeds MET also plans to take advantage of Mailscape’s rich reporting to present high level information to Management, and to help the IT team as they continue to manage and enhance the messaging service. As Steve continues:
We have especially valued the Exchange Public Folder reports available in Mailscape as we build our strategy to deal with over 17,000 public folders. Determining how Public Folders are being used (or not being used) has given us important insight to facilitate how we move forward with Public Folders. Another useful report has been to understand our email usage in terms of heavy, medium and light users because the Exchange sizing tools offered by Microsoft require this information, and without Mailscape Leeds Met team we had no easy way to categorise our users.
Going forward, Leeds MET are planning to roll out a customised dashboard to their Helpdesk team to proactively manage mailbox quota’s which has previously been an onerous task and one that they’ve not been able to tackle before using Mailscape.
Working with Essential through our trial and implementation of Mailscape has been a very positive experience. The support team have been bang on in handling queries and proactively ensuring we are getting everything we can from the product.
To discover how we can help you avoid downtime through monitoring & reporting on you Exchange environment and enquire about Mailscape, click on the link below:
