Product Review: Lepide Exchange Manager

Hello folks,

Today’s review will be about a tool called Lepide Exchange Manager developed by Lepide Software (www.lepide.com) and the version that we are using for this review is the version 12. This tool can be used with Exchange Server 2000/2003/2007 and 2010.

The trial version of the tool reviewed here can be found at http://www.lepide.com/exchange-manager/.

First impressions and overview...

Lepide Exchange Manager can be considered a Swiss Army knife for a messaging administrator and because of its neat features it allows a recover from a Disaster within a few steps, and besides of the recover capabilities which caught my attention at the first glance the tool also has search, report and export/import capabilities which are key for the daily exchange administration tasks.

The installation process is pretty straight forward and requires just a little of attention from the messaging administrator such as Outlook (32 or 64 bits) installed on the machine where the tool will be installed, other than that you will have the tool up and running in less than 5 minutes. Also, the message administrator must be prepared to seize disk properly in order to be able to restore large EDB/PSTs and OSTs files on the server where the tool is installed.

The tool was well designed and on its first page has two areas: Source and Destination where the administrator will spent most of the time during its working on the tool and all features and capabilities are no more than 2 clicks away from this initial page (figure 01).

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Figure 01: Lepide Exchange Manager main interface

The source is where the messaging administrator can define where the exchange information is coming from and here you have the server side with offline EDB (healthy and corrupted databases) and live exchange mailboxes (could be a single or multiples mailboxes) and also the client side where the traditional PST or even OST files can be used (Figure 01), and the second step is the destination where the messaging administrator can choose from a PST (new or existent) or Live Exchange Servers.

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Figure 02: Selecting a source

After defining Source and Destination the administrator will have access to all capabilities of the software that we are going over in the following sections where content can be copied/exported between Source and destination. The administrator also can check with a glance a preview of the exchange data loaded as Source and from there generate reports, search content, export data and so forth.

Search features…

The Search feature was reviewed as well and it allows the administrator to select many mailboxes and use several fields to perform a search (Figure 03) and because it can be run against offline DBs and also live mailboxes becomes a really good feature for auditing purposes. The administrator also has several tabs to narrow down the search and even exclude duplicates based on some parameters.

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Figure 03: Initial Search Source page

Reporting features...

The report is available at Mailbox level and the administrator just need to select with folder to be used in the report and the pre-defined Reports (Figure 04) and a page with the results will be displayed and then the administrator has the option to save them and the only option available is HTML

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Figure 04: Generating a Report

Import/Export features

Lepide Exchange Manager has great Import/Export features which are really handy for several scenarios, the first feature that catch my attention was the ability to export any content from an open source (Offline EDB, PST/OST, or Exchange live mailboxes) to either MSG or EML format and also the ability to save in a file with the same hierarchy (Figure 05). Besides of that you can also import the data back from those types of files.

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Figure 05: Exporting a message to a file which can be imported in similar process to a PST/Live mailbox

Besides of using this feature during a recover scenario it also can be well used to validate the Exchange backup where a restored database can be loaded into the tool and a message can be restored without impacting the production environment. I’m pretty sure that your Backup Team will love this feature when they have to satisfy SOX auditors.

Review Summary

In these final notes about this review I’m definitely giving two thumbs up for Lepide Exchange Manager or if you prefer the 1 to 5 scale I would definitely give a 4.5 where the product met and exceed my expectations.

This review was my first contact with Lepide Exchange Manager and I’m still impressed how easy was to deploy and get the results that were expected from the tool and also its performance to manage different source data (Exchange Offline Database EDB, PST/OST files and live mailboxes), especially in cases of a Disaster Recovery situation the tool becomes a key component and not just at the server level but also helping to export data from OST files.

Cheers,
Anderson Patricio
http://www.andersonpatricio.ca
http://www.andersonpatricio.org (Portuguese)
Twitter: @apatricio

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