Exchange 3rd party management tools supportability
in [Microsoft Exchange]
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From: David Chadwick on 3 May 2010 22:52 Hi, We are having a look at purchasing one of the various AD/Exchange management products (for example, "AD Manager Plus"). I have always wondered what the supportability of this kind of product is. If I create a user in the Exchange 2007 Management Console I *know* it has been done right. Microsoft gave me the tool to use and obviously it is the "official" way to create a mailbox. PowerShell would be another official Microsoft tool that I could use. When introducing a 3rd party product which takes over as the mechanism that creates and manipulates the mailbox, how supportable is this? How do I know that it does it "right"? Sure it can modify AD and all that kind of thing - but just because it appears to work OK doesn't mean I know for sure that it has done exactly what the official tool does when creating a mailbox. For all I know I could get a weird problem 2 years down the track when upgrading to Exchange 2010 which was caused by using a non-standard tool. If I ask the vendors they will, of course, tell me that it is all OK. Being the suspicious type that I am I wanted to look into this further. :) Does anyone know what Microsoft's official position is on this kind of thing? Exchange is just an example - the same applies for creating users in AD, enabling OCS etc. Cheers, David |