The 11 maintenance tasks Microsoft Exchange performs
Technical Framework’s Fort Collins & Greeley IT support and consulting team are dedicated to ensuring our clients have a system they can rely on. Beyond our customized services, we also want to spread the knowledge we have built up over our many years of experience in the industry.
This guide is intended to help those starting out trying to figure out the Microsoft Exchange server. Knowledge is power, and understanding how your system works is the first step to gaining control over it.
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange Server is calendaring software, a mail server and contact manager developed by Microsoft. It is a program that runs on Windows Server and is part of the Microsoft Servers line of products. With MS Exchange you can get business email and increase productivity, while keeping your organization safe.
Exchange Server runs a daily automated maintenance cycle to ensure it remains running efficiently. There are 11 key tasks that Microsoft Exchange runs each night to ensure that it is working at its peak:
- Purges the indexes on mailbox and public folder stores
- Performs tombstone maintenance on mailboxes and public folders
- Removes expired messages from the dumpster for the mailbox and public folder stores
- Removes expired messages from public folders
- Removes deleted public folders with tombstones more than 180 days old
- Cleans up message conflicts within public folders
- Updates server version information on public folders
- Checks for and removing duplicate site folders on public folder stores
- Cleans up deleted mailboxes on mailbox stores
- Checks the message table for orphaned messages (messages with a reference count of 0)
- Performs an online defragmentation of the Store
Exchange does each of these tasks in order, but if it doesn’t complete them it will still need to perform the final task. It is important to remember that the default time for the maintenance may not be suitable for your requirements. The maintenance tasks place a strain on resources so it is best to schedule them for a time when demand is low. You are able to check and alter the schedule to suit a time where you won’t be in need of the system resources. If your Exchange server has a number of information stores, it may pay to schedule them for different times.
Technical Framework’s Fort Collins & Greeley IT support consulting team has experience in setting up Microsoft Exchange servers. Trust our experience to help you set yours up today.
