Exchange Maintenance Just Got Easier

Lucid8's GOexchange® 3.0 to be unveiled at Tech Ed

Bellevue, WA, May 23, 2004

Lucid8 will be demonstrating the soon to be released next generation of GOexchange, the "Automated Maintenance Solution for Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003" at the Microsoft Tech Ed 2004 Conference held Sunday, May 23rd - Friday, May 28th, 2004 in San Diego California. Tech Ed is known as The definitive Microsoft conference for building, deploying, securing, and managing connected solutions

"This conference provides an ideal opportunity for Lucid8 to highlight the power and capability of GOexchange version 3.0," states Troy Werelius, Lucid8 President and CEO. "Administrators will appreciate all the new functionality that makes GOexchange a powerful, yet easy to use solution that delivers consistent and reliable results."

The Problem: Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003 consists of a complex directory structure containing multiple data stores that are constantly growing. Over time, data stores consume disk space well in excess of the actual data they store. In addition e-mail and other Exchange items, are being added, changed, and deleted on a continuous basis. The result is an Exchange Server with a highly fragmented internal data structure and increasingly inefficient index pointers, errors and inconsistencies.

The end result is that Exchange performance suffers due to data overload and erratic behavior that can make system administration a nightmare. In order to keep Exchange running in a healthy and optimal manner, each server must be maintained regularly to keep database store sizes in check and remove all errors and inconsistencies that can effect system operation.

There are manual steps you can take to alleviate the effects mentioned above, however these processes require an inordinate amount of time and in-depth expert knowledge of Exchange. In short, it's complex, tedious, time consuming work and takes more time and attention than most people have. In addition, when done manually, these steps are often incomplete and/or executed improperly which can have devastating results.

The Solution: GOexchange; the Automated Maintenance Solution for Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003 is a unique and innovative product that contains expert knowledge and processes to check Exchange databases for consistency, correct errors, warnings, MTA issues and more to improve system performance, while reducing the average message store by 30-55% when first used and then 5-20% thereafter.

One of Lucid8's main goals for GOexchange 3.0 was to release a product that builds upon its leadership in the Automated Exchange Maintenance arena, as well as addressing the specific needs of its customers. Through customer collaboration, Lucid8's GOexchange 3.0 has surpassed competitive and industry expectations with its industry-leading array of enhancements, functionality and support. GOexchange 3.0 offers the most cost-effective Automated Maintenance solution for Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003 available today.

New Interface: GOexchange 3.0 is built upon Microsoft's MMC to deliver a highly flexible and well-integrated management console to administrators, which leverages the power of this familiar consistent Explorer style interface to provide Enterprise Wide Exchange Server Maintenance.

New Features: Lucid8's new version of GOexchange 3.0 is powerful, flexible, and offers the following features and functionality:

• Advanced Configurations – Select from Offline Diagnostic Report, Full Maintenance, Analysis and Repair, or MTA Check only. GOexchange also supports such advanced features such as: automated maintenance progress notification, integrated backup, automated scheduling options, and other sophisticated features.

• Broad Scheduling Capabilities – Administrators can schedule unattended regular maintenance jobs for any server within their organization to automatically take place on specific days, times, and intervals.

• Centralized Scalable Management – MMC based centralized management console provides administrators with the ability to configure, manage, schedule, and review preventive maintenance for all Exchange Servers in their organization. GOexchange also scales to meet the needs of large enterprise environments with hundreds of Exchange Servers.

• Cross-Platform – Automatically detects which version of Exchange is installed, Exchange 5.5, 2000, or 2003, and then applies the appropriate rules and maintenance processes for each configuration.

• Granular & Targeted Maintenance - by server, storage group or individual store.

• High Availability Integration - Automatically detects and supports Microsoft Clustered Exchange servers in Active/Passive and Active/Active configurations.

• Integrated Backup - Best practices demand that a backup to disk or tape of the Exchange databases and other critical files is made prior to any maintenance process. To alleviate this tedious yet critical task, GOexchange has built-in integration with existing enterprise backup solutions from CA, CommVault, Veritas, UltraBac, and other leading backup solutions.

  •     GOexchange can initiate, monitor, and report the state of an Offline or Online Exchange backup job before and after Exchange maintenance.

  •     If the associated backup job is successful, then maintenance will be allowed to proceed. If however, for some reason, the backup job fails, then GOexchange will initiate a failover backup job via a secondary or tertiary backup server, if configured.

  •     If failover backup servers are not configured and the primary backup job has failed, then GOexchange will abort the maintenance process and notify the appropriate operator.

• Knowledge Protection - One of the pitfalls of employing a highly capable IT staff is the impact that employee turnover can have on your information infrastructure. When a well-trained administrator leaves your organization, their intimate knowledge of your Exchange system also goes out the door. GOexchange has built-in expert knowledge that will continue to grow and serve your organization 24x7x365 to obtain complete and flawless execution each and every time for Exchange 5.5, 2000, and 2003.

• Pre-Maintenance Notification - Notify specific persons, all members of a particular group, or the entire organization weeks, days, or hours before a scheduled maintenance.

• Post-Maintenance Notification - Notify individuals or the entire group of GOexchange operators that maintenance is complete and of any problems that occur and require attention.

• Resource Checking - Each maintenance job has several built-in resource checks to:

  •     Ensure the required resources such as disk space, information stores and backup systems are available prior to each maintenance job. If there is a deficiency of any type, GOexchange will notify the designated operators to correct the issue or abandon the scheduled maintenance.

  •     Record the state of critical services prior to the start of a maintenance job so that upon completion of maintenance, all services are returned to the pre-maintenance state.

• Security - GOexchange takes full advantage of Microsoft's software security model to ensure that only authorized Exchange Administrators have access to its powerful features.

• Unified Maintenance Reports - GOexchange documents every action that occurs during a maintenance configuration and job. Generates Summary and Detailed Reporting for every job

 

•     This includes a day, date, and time stamp feature providing a detailed audit trail.

•     Administrators can review both detail and summary maintenance details for each maintenance job.

•     Post maintenance summary reports can be automatically e-mail ed to designated individuals or groups.

Availability and Pricing Version 3.0 is available now through resellers around the world as well as directly from Lucid8. All users that purchased GOexchange after June 30th 2004 will receive a free upgrade to version 3.0. Product information, pricing and orders can be obtained from http://www.lucid8.com/pricing/pricelist.asp.

Company Information: Lucid8 is an independent Microsoft certified partner, and software development firm that specializes in Microsoft Exchange maintenance applications and disaster recovery services for Exchange Server. Established in 1996 the company has provided consulting, custom software development and disaster recover services for Exchange to enterprise customers worldwide. A privately held company, Lucid8's headquarters are in New Castle, WA.

For more information, visit the GOexchange website at http://www.lucid8.com or contact:

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