Want to check if your Exchange servers are configured how you designed them to be configured?

Then DCM, or Configuration Manager 2007 Desired Configuration Management to give it it’s full title, could be the way to go…

It’s part of the System Centre suite of products [SCCM] and it appears to be a really useful bit of software. You effectively create configuration items and can populate these using Powershell (which makes it particularly easy for Exchange 2007 administrators – even if like me you are not a dev guy), WMI, registry key or any type of scripting language you care to choose.  DCM runs the configuration items as a group relevant to a particular Exchange role on that server and reports back the results of that job. Does the script echo a response that it was expecting?  If so you get a green tick – if not a red cross.  ..and if you script it right you can echo the value of the property and therefore find out where the server is not configured correctly and the incorrect value – useful when you consider you might be looking for hundreds of configuration items.

So if you need to verify if you’ve remembered to disable message tracking on your hub transport server then the only code you need is:

$return=(Get-TransportServer -id:$env:computername).MessageTrackingLogEnabled
write-host $return

And the value echo’d needs to match ‘False’ as defined in DCM.  …easy.

Have a look here for more information on DCM - Introduction to Desired Configuration Management (DCM) in SCCM 2007 @ ‘System Center Forum.org’

Also worth having a look at one of our partners (Silect Software) and their CP Studio product.

I’ll post more as I get it…