Exchange System Manager for Vista

We recently released a downloadable Exchange System Manager (ESM) for Exchange 2003 which can be installed on Vista machines. Part of what made this possible was the changes we did recently to allow Exchange's implementation of the MAPI client binaries to run on Vista.

Some interesting tidbits from the Release Notes:

• The downloadable ESM depends on the MAPI Download, which must be installed first.
• Therefore - the ESM and Outlook cannot be installed on the same machine. Of course, this is old news - we've never supported the ESM and Outlook on the same machine.
• This download is for Vista only. It does not support Windows Server 2008.

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2008
  Hi, Does this imply that the MAPI/CDO web download, apparently for Exchange 2007, is fully and officially supported for use with Exchange 2003 in other versions of Windows? That is, there is no reason now to install the Exchange 2003 ESM and its updates on a (server) machine if all that is needed is MAPI/CDO? Thanks.

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2008
  The MAPI download is built out of an Exchange 2003 branch. So it is Exchange 2003's MAPI, with an installer wrapped around it.

• Anonymous
  September 17, 2008
  I was able to trick the installer into installing the ESM along with Outlook. <Steve here> I've excised the rest of this comment. It doesn't matter if you can force the ESM to install alongside Outlook. What matters is that if you do it, there are conflicts and there will be problems. I've debugged too many issues that turned out to be caused by this to condone helping people shoot themselves in the foot.

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  So you've never heard of problems - except the problems you actually experienced. Interesting. :) We've never supported ESM on a machine with Outlook, so no, there are no Vista specific workarounds to offer.

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  The issues we had were minor.  Nothing to indicate the "shoot yourself in the foot" kind of issues inferred above.   As to my question, it was less of "how to make esm work with outlook", but more is there any alternative. Point being, many of us admins are reluctantly switching over to Vista, and losing access to things we use regularly from our desktops.

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  You can put the ESM on another machine and remote to it, or put the ESM in a virtual machine and use the VM to manage Exchange.

• Anonymous
  November 14, 2008
  Will there be a version of this that can be installed on Windows 2008 server?   I would like to be able to manage the Exchange 2003 that is running in a virtual machine without having to fire up the Hyper-V console every time.   So I guess that would be Server 2008 x64 to be specific.

• Anonymous
  July 13, 2009
  What is the point, most admins want to run ESM on there Vista workstaion the very reason for this is they are running exchange and therfore Outlook.it seem kind of pointless to create a VM without outlook so you can run Vista ESM. may aswell logon to the exchange server via RDP.

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2010
  I personally keep my Outlook/tools machine seperate from my development machine.