Quest® MessageStats
Version 6.6.0 (Build 1694)
Release Notes
May 2009
Resolved Issues and Enhancements
Quest® MessageStats is a Windows-based data collection and reporting application that facilitates the analysis of messaging statistics for a number of messaging environments. The core MessageStats application focuses on Microsoft Exchange messaging systems.
Through additional report packs, MessageStats can gather and report on parts
of other messaging systems such as BlackBerry®, SendMail and PostFix,
Quest Archive Manager, Microsoft OWA (Outlook Web Access), Microsoft Office
Communications Server, Lotus Notes, and Windows Mobile®.
MessageStats provides comprehensive information regarding critical metrics for
resource usage, capacity monitoring and
planning, and migration preparedness. It also provides detailed information for
monitoring mailbox content and mail flow,
allowing you to track capacity and improper usage.
To aid information gathering from wide-ranging messaging systems, MessageStats
provides a dynamic task-based
gathering engine that allows the collection of information to be intelligently
scheduled, minimizing the impact to the
messaging system and corporate network. In addition, MessageStats offers the
ability to horizontally scale out gathering
components so that MessageStats can gather efficiently from remote messaging
systems.
With the extensive information that MessageStats gathers, MessageStats provides
an extremely flexible web-based
reporting engine that allows all interested individuals to view messaging
information and to package the information in
many different ways. All reports are available by accessing the web site
directly, by signing up for automated
subscriptions that can be sent to any email address, or through export to a
number of supported formats.
This section describes the new features that can be found in Quest MessageStats release 6.6.0:
Updated Archiving Feature for Tracking Logs
MessageStats now allows the archival of tracking logs to any remote file
server (not necessarily a MessageStats server). In addition, MessageStats
will compress the tracking logs before archival to provide more efficient
storage of these tracking logs.
Enhanced Server Roles for Exchange 2007
In MessageStats, server roles that reflect the standard built-in Exchange
server roles are already defined and available for use. For Exchange 2007,
MessageStats can now retrieve the server roles for a server from Active
Directory, and assign a matching built-in server role value in MessageStats.
In this release, you can also add additional custom server roles that can be
assigned to your Exchange 2000, 2003, or 2007 servers. Server roles can be
used to filter data on reports.
Intelligent Gatherings for Exchange 2007
Using the server role, MessageStats can determine which server-level
gathering tasks can run against a specific Exchange 2007 server. For
example, if a server does not have the Mailbox role, MessageStats does not
allow a Mailbox gathering task to run against the server. By allowing
gathering tasks to run only against Exchange 2007 servers with appropriate
server roles, MessageStats can improve task performance.
Server Availability Reporting for Microsoft
Operations Manager (MOM) or System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
MessageStats can gather information from your MOM or SCOM database and
extract server availability metrics. The metrics are stored in the
MessageStats database and can be viewed in the MessageStats Server
Availability report.
Force a Task to Regather Information in the
Same (UTC) Day
To reduce the impact on resource consumption,
MessageStats has built-in gathering rules that prevent a task from gathering
information more than once within a single (UTC) day. If a task has already
successfully completed and you rerun it in the same day, it does not
regather the information. Changes do not appear in reports until the task
runs the following day. However, if you have made changes and want to have
them immediately reflected in reports that day, you can now use the Run
Now with Override option to force a task to regather information.
Additional Storage Group
Reporting
The MessageStats Reports now include the
storage groups associated with mailboxes. You can also filter the reports in
the Mailboxes node by storage group.
Enhanced Ability to Map Paths for Information
Stores
For situations in which an Exchange server has multiple information store
databases located on more than one Storage Area Network (SAN) or Network
Attached Storage (NAS) device, you can now configure MessageStats to gather
the store information from each of these paths. You can specify a separate
path for each information store.
Updated Platform Support
MessageStats 6.6.0 now fully supports SQL Server 2008 and Internet Explorer
8.
The following is a list of issues addressed and enhancements implemented in this release of MessageStats.
|
Feature |
Resolved Issue |
Defect ID |
|
Gathering |
Exchange tracking log processing did not free the file handle. In this case, the archiving process might start accidently as a result of file handle not being freed. | TFS#52198 |
| Mailbox Content and Attachment Gathering was not stopping when there was a database connection failure. | TFS#52135 | |
| The Tracking Log Archive task was not showing file deletion errors. The Tracking Log Archive task showed success even though the file was not deleted. | TFS#47358 | |
| Tracking log processing in a mixed 2003/2007 Exchange organization might not execute all tracking log tasks. | TFS#61183 | |
| The tracking log gathering was not counting System Messages accurately from system mailboxes named "SystemMailbox{guid}" (predominantly for Exchange 2007). | TFS#57113 | |
| The Exchange Mailbox Security gathering failed when an explicit Gathering Server was specified. | TFS#66324 | |
|
Reports |
The Server Roles for Exchange 2007 were reported in all languages. | TFS#59388 |
| When using the Send Graph To..." option in reports, the customer received an error that said "A specified logon session does not exist. It may already have been terminated." | TFS#73218 | |
| Content and Attachment custom data sources on a custom report show errors when you select the Display Name as a field. The following error was displayed: “Unexpected error while attempting to read from the database. Column '_IntResult.SIPAddress' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.” | TFS#52137 | |
| Custom Reports: The advanced summary calculations count for the Date Field did not return a count. | TFS#50340 | |
| Custom Reports: When a customer selected the Display Name field for any mailbox in a custom data source that was included as an aggregate field (using the Count operator), the field did not appear in the report. | TFS#52133 | |
| The gathering status reports failed with "SubQuery Returned More than 1 Row" errors when tasks were migrated to a blank database. | TFS#51008 | |
| The information store sizes in reports showed as zero for Exchange 2007 servers that used Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR). | TFS#56893 | |
| The local delivery values for messages were not adding up correctly. | TFS#35067 | |
| MessageStats Reports did not properly track messages that submitted by SMTP in Exchange 2000/2003 when sending to a distribution list. | TFS#57128 | |
| Top Distribution List reports did not include external originators. The reports only counted internal originators in its aggregation of the Top Distribution Lists. | TFS#64785 |
The following is a list of issues known to exist at the time of MessageStats release.
|
Feature |
Known Issue |
Defect ID |
|
Installation Issues
|
During installation, if you choose to install the MessageStats database to a remote SQL server, you must have either SQL Express or MSDE installed on the local machine. You can remove it from the local machine after successful installation. | |
When you upgrade from MessageStats 6.1.1 or
from MessageStats 6.5.0, all task execution server properties revert to their default values.
After you complete the upgrade, use the following procedure to restore any
changes that you made to the task execution server properties:
|
||
When MessageStats Reports is installed on a Windows Server 2008 machine, and if
you view the MessageStats Reports using a browser on the same machine as the IIS
server, you can receive the following error message:
In certain circumstances, you can also see other error messages that indicate permission was denied while trying to access resources on the web server. To correct this issue, you must turn off Internet Explorer Protected Mode for the local MessageStats Reports web site.
If you use other URLs such as http://localhost/MessageStatsReports to access the site, you must also add http://localhost as a trusted site. This configuration change is required only if you view the MessageStats Reports web site on the same computer that hosts MessageStats Reports. |
||
|
If you have customized the qmsReports.udl file to support SQL Server authentication, you must make changes to run reports on Windows Server 2008. On Windows Server 2008, saving changes to the qmsReports.udl file has no effect unless you are running with elevated permissions. This occurs because changes to the qmsReports.udl are saved in a per-user area of the file system instead of the per-computer location used by MessageStats Reports. To avoid this issue, you must edit and save the file with elevated UAC (User Account Control) rights. From the Start menu, right-click CMD.EXE, and select Run as Administrator. At the command prompt, enter:
Note: If MessageStats is not installed in the default path, modify the command to include the path where it is installed. |
||
|
Customers that are using Exchange 2007, but who do not have Exchange System Manager (ESM) for Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003, should use the Microsoft MAPI+CDO software download (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E17E7F31-079A-43A9-BFF2-0A110307611E&displaylang=en) as their MAPI subsystem provider. This software must be installed wherever ESM would have been installed. |
|
|
| MessageStats Reports can be installed on 64-bit operating systems, but IIS must be reconfigured for MessageStats Reports to operate correctly. On 64-bit operating systems, you must reconfigure IIS to run in 32-bit mode. For instructions on how to do configure IIS to run the 32-bit version of ASP.NET, see the Microsoft Knowledgebase Article 894435 (http://support.microsoft.com/?id=894435). This procedure can cause compatibility issues with other web applications on the same IIS Web Server so it is recommended that MessageStats Reports be run only on servers without other web applications. | ||
|
During installation, if the installation and service accounts are different, the MessageStats installer requests a reboot. This reboot is required to ensure that the Service Account has the appropriate rights to run the service. Note: On x64 implementations, a reboot is requested and the MessageStats installer does not resume the installation. In this case, you must rerun the Setup.exe file to continue the installation. |
TFS#33536 |
|
| SQL Server Agent must be running to use the Database Management tasks: database reindexing, defragmenting, or database aging. Note: SQL Express (the personal edition of SQL 2005) does not include the SQL Server Agent. Database Maintenance tasks are not available when running on SQL Express; use either MSDE or full SQL Server. | ||
| There is a known issue in which the MessageStats installer does not verify the server name that is entered for the scheduler service. As a result, an incorrect server name causes an error to occur later in the installation process. To correct this problem, uninstall MessageStats and re-install with the correct name for the scheduler service. | ||
| If you install MessageStats on Windows Server 2003, ASP (Active Server Pages)
support is turned off by default. You must enable ASP support in order for
MessageStats to install properly. Note: You must have IIS installed and ASP support enabled before installing the .NET Framework. |
||
| MessageStats does not support case sensitivity on SQL Server. Some non-Latin database collations can cause SQL Server to observe case sensitivity. | ||
| Quest Software does not support installation of MessageStats for scenarios where the installation files have been encrypted. | ||
| Quest Software does not support the installation of MessageStats on domain controllers or on Exchange servers. | ||
| If you are installing MessageStats Reports on Windows Server 2008, you must reboot the server after the installation is complete. | ||
|
Gathering Issues |
||
| Inherited mailbox permissions are retrieved only if Exchange System Manager 2003 is used as the MAPI subsystem provider. If the Microsoft MAPI+CDO download or Outlook 2007 is used, only non-inherited mailbox permissions can be retrieved. | ||
| There is a known issue with the Connectors gathering task when run it is against organizations that contain Exchange 2007 servers. If these organizations contain connectors of the type ‘msExchRoutingSMTPConnector’ that do not have a legacyExchangeDN attribute set, a warning is generated. You can safely ignore this warning. | TFS#34144 | |
| MAPI-based gatherings (mailbox, public folder, and content and attachment gatherings) can unexpectedly fail if run on a machine that has both Outlook and Exchange System Manager (ESM) installed. Running Outlook and Exchange System Manager on the same machine is not supported by Quest Software due to conflicts in the underlying MAPI components. Please refer to the following Microsoft Knowledgebase article 266418: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q266418. | ||
| For all Public Folder gatherings to be successful from Exchange 2003 servers, you must be running ESM 2003 SP 2 on the Task Execution Server. | ||
| MessageStats requires all public folders to have the Folder Visible permission. MessageStats may generate warnings during public folder gatherings while attempting to open public folders and child folders of public folders without this permission. For more information, see the Microsoft knowledge base article 203646. | ||
| There is a known issue with the Mailbox gathering for Exchange servers with multiple Mailbox Stores. If not all the Mailbox Stores are available on an Exchange server, the gathering task is completed for the available stores and the status for the task is Successful. However, the information for the mailboxes in the unavailable stores is not added to the database. | ||
| When connecting to a multi-domain organization that contains NT domains with Exchange 5.5 servers, an Exchange 2000/2003 server should be used as the Connect To server for MessageStats to properly gather data. | ||
|
Reporting Issues |
By default, Internet Explorer, when running on 64-bit versions of Windows Server
2008, is configured to run in Enhanced Security mode. This prevents you from
viewing MessageStats Reports. To allow viewing of MessageStats Reports from a Windows Server 2008 computer, click the Enable IE ESC link on the main panel of Server Manager. |
|
|
MessageStats Reports subscriptions that contain reports with the "Local Time" enabled will use the daylight savings time settings that were in effect at the time the subscription was created or saved. When the daylight savings time change goes into effect in the US in 2007, the data in these reports can be off by one hour during the three week period affected by the change. To correct the problem, load the subscription, view the filter settings panel for each affected report, and resave the subscription. Before you perform this operation, you must apply the Windows time zone update patch (KB933360) on the machine on which Internet Explorer is running. Interactive reports and other features of MessageStats Reports are not affected by this problem. |
|
|
| MessageStats Reports cannot run on IIS servers on which the Microsoft Media
Server has been installed in the root web directory. An error message appears
stating, "Microsoft .Net Framework version x.x must be installed on the IIS
server that hosts this application." This error occurs because the Microsoft
Media Server applies configuration options that affect all applications running
on the server. The recommended solution is to create a second virtual IIS server on the machine that is to host MessageStats Reports, and install MessageStats Reports on the virtual server that is not hosting Windows Media Server. |
||
| If you are producing reports containing Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters, you must install the East Asian language pack on the computer hosting MessageStats Reports. You must also install the language pack on any computer to be used to view these reports. | ||
| If you attempt to run MessageStats Reports on an IIS server on which SharePoint
has been installed, an error message appears, stating, "Microsoft .Net Framework
version x.x must be installed on the IIS server that hosts this application."
This error occurs because the Microsoft SharePoint installer implements tighter
security on the IIS server which prevents MessageStats Reports from operating
correctly. The recommended solution is to create a second virtual IIS server on the machine that hosts MessageStats Reports, and install MessageStats Reports on a virtual server other than the server that is hosting SharePoint. MessageStats Reports can also be installed on the same virtual server by following the instructions given in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 828810: How to enable an ASP.Net application to run on a SharePoint virtual server. |
||
| If you are accessing a long-running report on a Windows 2003 Server, you may be prompted to log in due to a time-out. After you enter the user credentials, the Internet Explorer 401.2 error page displays. This problem occurs on servers with a heavy server load. The workaround is to set the IIS ConnectionTimeout parameter to a longer time such as 15 minutes. For more information about this parameter, see the Microsoft article on ConnectionTimeout. | ||
| By default, times are not displayed in Excel. When exporting reports that contain date/time fields to Microsoft Excel, load the exported file into Excel, select the column containing date/time information, and apply an appropriate Excel format string using the Format | Cells menu command. | ||
| MessageStats may differ by 1 KB on values reported in either Microsoft Exchange Administrator or Microsoft Exchange System Manager due to the nature of rounding implemented by Microsoft. | ||
| If two identical mailbox display names appear on a report that contains a graph, the graph groups the mailboxes together. |
Before installing MessageStats, ensure your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements:
| Minimum Hardware Requirements | |
| Processor | Pentium 4, running at a minimum speed of 2.4 GHz |
| Memory |
2 GB |
| Hard Disk Space | 250 MB of free disk space for the
application.
|
| Other | Sufficient space for the temporary tracking
log cache, application logs, and task documents. The size of this cache
depends on the number of servers, the number of tracking logs on each
server, and the size of each tracking log. The space should exist on a
local disk drive rather than a network drive.
|
| Minimum Software Requirements | |
| Operating System | One of the following:
|
| MAPI.DLL | Exchange Systems Manager (ESM) 2000 SP 3 or
ESM 2003 SP 2 is required.
|
| MessageStats Reports Server | IIS 5.0 or later. For Windows Server 2008, IIS 7.0 is required. There are also certain IIS role services that must be enabled. See the section titled "IIS Role Services on Windows Server 2008" in the MessageStats Quick Start Guide for more information. |
| MessageStats Database Server | Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (SP4), SQL Server
2005 (SP2), or SQL Server 2008.
|
| Database Management feature | For the Database Management feature,
SQL Distributed Management Objects (SQL-DMO) must be installed on
the server that hosts the MessageStats MMC console.
The SQL-DMO component is part of the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility package. You can download the SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility package from the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or the SQL Server 2008 Feature Packs: SQL Server 2005 Feature Pack (December 2008) and SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack (October 2008). |
| Browser | Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 or later. |
| Additional Software | Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or
later. Note: For more information about resolving common ASP.NET configuration problems, see Appendix A: Microsoft .NET Configuration Issues in the MessageStats Quick Start Guide.
|
| Microsoft Office Communicator Presence in reports | To see presence status information in
mailbox-specific reports, the person viewing the reports must have Office Communicator
2005 or later installed, configured, and running.
Also Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 or later must be
installed.
The Exchange organization must have Microsoft Live Communication Server 2005 or Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 configured and running. |
| Documentation | Acrobat Reader 7.0 or higher is recommended to access the Administrator Guide, Reports User Guide, and Quick Start Guide PDF documents. |
This section contains information about installing and operating this product
in non-English configurations, such as those needed by customers outside of
North America. This section does not replace the materials about supported
platforms and configurations found elsewhere in the product documentation.
This release is Unicode-enabled and supports any character set. In this release,
all product components should be configured to use the same or compatible
character encodings and should be installed to use the same locale and regional
options. This release is targeted to support operations in the following
regions: North America, Western Europe and Latin America, Japan.
MessageStats contains some third party components (listed below). Copies of their licenses may be found on our website at http://www.quest.com/legal/third-party-licenses.aspx.
| Component | License or Acknowledgement |
| Boost 1.34.1 (MessageStats Gathering) | Boost Software License - Version 1.0 |
| Boost 1.0 (MessageStats Gathering) | Boost Software License - Version 1.0 |
| Cryto-API version 2 (MessageStats Console and Service) | Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 |
| JCL 1.1 (MessageStats Console and Gathering) | Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 |
The MessageStats release package contains the following products:
Refer to the MessageStats Quick Start Guide for installation instructions and information about required permissions.
Get the latest product information, find helpful resources, and join a discussion with the Quest MessageStats team and other community members. Join the MessageStats community at http://messagestats.inside.quest.com/
| info@quest.com | |
| Quest Software, Inc. World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 USA |
|
| Web |
Refer to our Web site for regional and international office information.
Quest Support is available to customers who have a trial version of a Quest product or who have purchased a commercial version and have a valid maintenance contract.
Quest Support provides around the clock coverage with SupportLink, our web self-service. Visit SupportLink at http://support.quest.com.
From SupportLink, you can do the following:
View the Global Support Guide for a detailed explanation of support programs, online services, contact information, and policy and procedures.
The guide is available at:
http://support.quest.com/pdfs/Global Support Guide.pdf. This guide is available in English only.
© 2009 Quest Software, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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| Quest Software World Headquarters
LEGAL Dept 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656
Email: legal@quest.com |
Refer to our website for regional and international office information.
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The information in this document is provided in connection with Quest products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property right is granted by this document or in connection with the sale of Quest products. EXCEPT AS SET FORTH IN QUEST'S TERMS AND CONDITIONS AS SPECIFIED IN THE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THIS PRODUCT, QUEST ASSUMES NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER AND DISCLAIMS ANY EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY RELATING TO ITS PRODUCTS INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL QUEST BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE, SPECIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION OR LOSS OF INFORMATION) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THIS DOCUMENT, EVEN IF QUEST HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. Quest makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this document and reserves the right to make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time without notice. Quest does not make any commitment to update the information contained in this document.