Microsoft Exchange Server is a mailing, calendaring, contact, scheduling, and collaboration platform. It runs on Windows Server operating systems. Microsoft designed Exchange Server to allow users to access messaging platform from desktops, mobile devices, and web-based systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0. Exchange Server initially uses a protocol called MAPI but later on added support for POP3, IMAP, and EAS. The standard protocol SMTP is used to communicate with other internet mail servers.
Current Version
The current version of Microsoft Exchange Server is 2019 released on October 2018. One of the key features in the latest version is it can be deployed into Windows Server Core for the first time.
Exchange Server is known for its high availability features and offers many benefits for better management of emails, calendars, contacts, tasks, etc.
Mailbox storage quotas – It is the calculation of complete storage space available for hosting an Exchange Server. For example, if you have 50 mailboxes or user accounts in Exchange Server and every mailbox is assigned minimum 250 MB of storage space, then you should at least 12.5 GN available space in database. It is like that the storage quota is 250 MB for every mailbox.
Database White space – The size of Exchange database is not managed according to defined space for each mailbox. Some user mailboxes have more space in their mailbox while some have reached that storage limit. In this case, the blank spaces are called database white space. It is managed by ongoing online defragmentation process.
Actual mailbox size – To know the actual mailbox size, the administrators have to plan for managing more spaces for data storage and they have to create another database or need to delete the mailbox data for saving space.
Mailbox database recoverable items – It belongs to the retention policy of any deleted item like emails and calendars from Exchange mailbox. The default time for email retention is 14 days and 120 days for calendars in Exchange Server 2010. All the soft-deleted items are stored in a dumpster, a kind of recycle bin.
Content Indexing – Content Indexing takes 10% of the mailboxes so administrators have to plan for this space too. It manages the content by creating the index table.
Offline database maintenance – When you compact data in offline, it needs 10 or more than 10% more storage space than the target database.
Recovery database – Creates to prevent the data from any accidental situation. The situation could be lost mailboxes, database corruption, not accessible mailboxes, and many more.
Database Growth overhead – It is not calculated within the important factors for storing the data. 20% additional space should be created in complete database size before deploying the database. This 20% space is needed to manage overhead situations.
Exchange Server and Outlook
Exchange Server and Outlook is really connected to each other and they are important for each other. To access emails in offline mode, you need to configure MS Outlook with Exchange Server. Different configuration and connection techniques are provided by Outlook with Exchange Server. Other than Outlook, no other client is used to access emails from Exchange Server.
A – Microsoft Exchange Server database is an email and calendar management server that manages email processing, storage, calendar sharing, task management, etc. It comes with several features that have the facility to manage complete office or organization.
A – The current or the latest edition of Exchange Server is 2019. Exchange Server 2019 can be deployed into Windows Server Core and supports running Exchange Server with up to 48 processor cores and 256 GB RAM.
A – The retention policy in Exchange Server plays an important role. An Exchange administrator can add various policies for different mailboxes according to the mailbox value.
A – EDB is the database file extension in Exchange Server. Two types of EDB files are there in Exchange Server – private.edb and public.edb
A – For every user account, there is a mailbox that is created when a user profile is created in Exchange Database Server. Mailbox contains details like emails, contacts, calendars, etc.
A – OWA or Outlook Web Access is used to access emails for Exchange Server through web browsers. All configurations are managed by Exchange Management Console or Exchange Admin Center.
Conclusion
The article focus on Exchange Server – its history, features, its connection with Outlook, and common problems faced by users. We have tried to discuss all the important things in this article that one should know about Exchange Server.