Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with SP1

4 The Exchange Management Shell

The original Exchange administration program, ADMIN.EXE, did a good job of managing small groups of servers (a site), but Microsoft did not design the ADMIN program for the enterprise, so it faltered in large deployments because it struggled to deal with large numbers of servers or a very distributed environment. ADMIN did not support a generally available API, so what you got with ADMIN was what you used. Things improved somewhat in Exchange 2000 with the introduction of the Exchange System Manager (ESM), based on the MMC (Microsoft Management Console) framework. ESM uses many different APIs such as CDOEXM and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), but while ISVs could build their own snap-ins for MMC, the ...