Microsoft Windows Server System
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.
“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
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.
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 about
the 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
Benefits
 Faster troubleshooting
 Fewer help desk calls
 Better system performance
 More effective spam filtering
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.
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.
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.
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 /CleanFreeBusy command

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
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


“I spent two weeks
trying to figure the
problem out myself. It
was a real nightmare.
After I ran the analyzer, I
was able to fix the
problem in less than a
day.”
Sam Cochran, Network Administrator,
Precision Aerostructures
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 email 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 issues using 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 report
suggested 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 email 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.”
For More Information
Microsoft Windows Server System
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For more information about TECT
Corporation products and services, call
(229) 228-8910 or visit the Web site at:
www.tectcorp.com
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
© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case
study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
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Document published November 2005
Technologies
− Microsoft Exchange Server Best
Practices Analyzer