Managing the Exchange environment is a daunting task. Most organizations allocate at least one full time position to maintain high availability for email and manage its complexities. The daily issues range from increased storage consumption, performance issues and dealing with unplanned outages. Exchange simply cannot be left alone without incuring some issue which ultimate affects everyone using email.

Three major issues keep the administrator busy: Upgrades, Performance and Storage consumption.

Archives

Keeping up with Exchange releases is desirable from a feature standpoint. However, the planning and execution of this migration to newer technology can take months or sometimes years to pull off. High availability, storage planning and disaster recovery are all key concerns during this process. The complexity of this upgrade cannot be overstated and any glitch during the migration is usually visible at all levels of the organization. For these reasons, planning and clean execution along with simplification of the process is paramount for an Exchange Upgrade.

Performance

Stubs themselves, over time, can clog up Exchange and cause performance issues.  One of the main reasons for this is that item counts (i.e., how many messages you have) often drive performance bottlenecks in Outlook and Exchange as much as does mailbox size. Conversely, the increase in storage consumption within Exchange has a negative effect on the backup time window required for Exchange and the increased number of tapes required for backup. Most organizations pay for the offsite retention of these backups which means additional cost incurred for the management of an ever growing Exchange installation.

Storage

Most end users simply do not want email deleted and this effects the amount of storage needed to support Exchange. When pushed on the issue, users will archive to PST files located on their local storage and the IT department unwittingly relinguishes control of that data. Nearly all the available email archiving solutions can reduce Exchange storage, but they incur the penalty of thousands of stub files in Outlook. Stubbing involves replacing items in Exchange with a stub or pointer that refers to the original message and attachments now placed in an archive. However, Microsoft does not recommend stubbing and does not support the "hacking" of the Exchange database for the purpose of storage reduction as it still leaves artifacts in the database that need removal later on.