MAP Toolkit: How does MAP discover Exchange servers?

IMPORTANT: Keep checking the MAP Blog and MAP Toolkit Content Index (en-US) for updates and changes , especially after new versions of MAP are released.

Q: How does MAP detect installed Exchange Servers, and how does it distinguish those servers from computers that only have Exchange Administration tools installed?

To detect Exchange Servers, MAP solely relies on information obtained from Active Directory about the currently deployed Exchange topology.  To determine the list of Exchange Servers, MAP queries AD for all objects where (objectClass=msExchExchangeServer). This should work for all versions of Exchange that use Active Directory to store Exchange configuration information (back to Exchange 2000).

Q: How does MAP identify the Edition of Exchange that's installed (Standard or Enterprise)?

When MAP retrieves the msExchExchangeServer object from Active Directory, one of the attributes of that object is the "type" attribute. This is an obscured, encoded Unicode string that contains the product edition that's installed on the server.   Information on decoding and interpreting the type attribute is available in the "Exchange Edition Decode Algorithm" section of the "Active Directory Schema Changes Reference.doc", available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=152873.

For more information and to download the tool, please see the MAP Microsoft site.