Having spent several hours on Friday rebuilding an exchange 2007 after removing/reinstalling the software I've had several issues arise this week as the configuration of the rebuilt server is not identical to the previous server. Things like send/receive message size,quotas, web address's etc. They were not reconfigured as the machine was new to me. Exchange 2000/2003 had exchdump that would give you most of the configuration in a txt document that you could peruse if you wanted to see what the value for configuration x was. Is there something for exchange2007? I would have thought there would be a powershell cmdlet like get-config that would dump the configuration to xml/txt/html for safekeeping. Am I missing something obvious or is this not possible. If there isn't a script already, what do other people use to document their exchange configuration tweaks?

Good server build and configuration documentation is hard to come by. Ecora (www.ecora.com) used to have an Exchange Configuration reports tool. I took a quick look at their site and could not tell if it was still a standalone product or if it was bundled in with one of there other products now.Also, this may be useful to you. Microsoft has publisheda series of templates for Exchange Server 2007.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc533547.aspxJim McBee - Blog - http://mostlyexchange.blogspot.com

I just write a build document as I'm building the first exchange server, including pre-install instructions, install procedures, and any post install procedures that need to be done. With Exchange 2003 I used a lot of screenshots, but since a lot of stuff in E2K7 can be done through the command line I've stopped doing that and the build docs are a lot smaller now. I do a specific build doc for each role we have (hub, cas, mailbox). I did the same with Exchange 2003 since we seperated roles then as well (front-end, smtp bridgehead, public folder server, mailbox server). Here's the basic layout of my HUB build doc: 1 - Verify needed software is on the server and license keys are available 2 - Install pre-requisite software (windows os stuff is done with SerevrManagerCMD since we're using Windows 2008) 3 - Install Exchange HUB role 4 - Install any service packs and post sp patches/rollups 5 - Install Exchange AV 6 - Install monitoring and backup agents 7 - Post install configuration of Exchange, done in the EMS Each one of these sections has a step-by-step list of everything you do, that way I can hand this off to a junior Exchange admin and s/he can build Exchange servers without any sueprvision. HINT: if you do decide to use screenshots there's a nifty trick you can use with mspaint to crop the screenshot so that it's smaller. Also, save it as a JPEG before inserting it into the document, you'll save a ton of space over bmp files.

To add to the other responses:Beaware of:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124780.aspx "What Needs to Be Protected in an Exchange Environment"Additionally you can use ExBpa to take "snapshots".

thanks for the help so far - the machine I was working on was installed by another company, nothing was documented and I don't want to repeat the process again. The customer is slightly annoyed that we have to keep tweaking a couple of things as they are not usual settings so I'm hoping to have their current settings and a build process too. Looks like I might doing a whole load of get-ex commandlets and piping the output to a html document ......

HINT: if you do decide to use screenshots there's a nifty trick you can use with mspaint to crop the screenshot so that it's smaller. Also, save it as a JPEG before inserting it into the document, you'll save a ton of space over bmp files. Personally I use onenote and the screenclipping tool so that a) the graphic is ocr'ed and therefore searchable and b) its very quick to use - especially if I'm doing the install on a rdp session to the server. Also I like screenshotcaptor as it has some really nice graphic tweaks and the ability to annotate the captures too. I try to avoid png as unfortunately we use Notes inhouse and our version doesn't support png files

The link from Andy David has documented the method to backup/restore the configuration settings on each exchange 2007 server role