Testing Exchange Server connectivity

If you are fairly new to administering Exchange Servers, you’ll often wonder if you have configured all the connectivity options correctly. One way of checking this is to test things from both inside and outside your organisation, but sometimes you don’t have the necessary hard/software to do these tests. Enter a great solution provided by Microsoft: the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer

  Exchange Remote Connectivity tester

This tool will let you test things such as ActiveSync, Outlook Anywhere and so forth. All you need to do is use a valid user account, and point the tester to your server(s), and wait while it attempts to connect. If it isn’t successful, it shows a log of all the steps it took, along with the point where it failed. This makes it an excellent tool for troubleshooting.

Credit for this goes to a post on the EduGeek.net forums, where I discovered this little gem. I don’t know if this works with Exchange 2003, but it definitely works with Exchange 2007 and 2010.