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Have you had a need to document your Exchange environment? Do you need a tool to help you plan your upgrade of Exchange? Is your documentation current for compliance purposes?
In my job at Nutanix, one of the things I do is support our sales engineers globally on Exchange and other Microsoft solutions. And yes, on-premise Exchange is still going strong, even with O365 in the mix. I still see a lot of engagements in the field with Exchange and usually around keeping their data out of the cloud or a dependence on some kind of line of business application.
In any case, one of the biggest challenges transitioning to Hyperconverged technologies like Nutanix is understanding what you currently have. The complexities of legacy 3-teir infrastructure are hard enough. You also need to understand the requirements of your current Exchange environment. Depending on the size of your Enterprise, this can be a time burn and can have a margin of error. You need to understand Exchange PowerShell and other touch points in the Exchange environment.
I originally built this tool, when I was working as a System Integrator before I joined Nutanix. Its original purpose was for documenting a client Exchange environment after I was finished building it out. The tool is based on PowerShell and leverages Microsoft Word to generate the final document. Currently, the tool only documents Exchange 2010 and does a basic hardware inventory. My vision for the tool is to support all current versions of Exchange including O365 and build out a front-end GUI with report options. Maybe eventually, becoming a planning tool for sizing and transitioning your Exchange environment to true cloud-like agile infrastructure.
I started a GitHub project and you can check it out here.
http://netwatchme.github.io/Exchange-Documenter/
In this fast-paced world, we need as much automation as possible to make our jobs more efficient, so, we as engineers can have more time back at home or doing the things we enjoy :). To quote a line from Kirt in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan “Hours instead of days! Now, we have minutes instead of hours.” pretty much sums the world we live in.
Live long and prosper…Until next time, Rob…..