Exch Administration Center (EAC) - 2013 Preview

[Alex]

Exch Administration Center (EAC) - 2013 Preview

The Exchange Administration Center (EAC) is the web-based management console in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Preview that allows for ease of use and is optimized for on-premises, online, or hybrid Exchange deployments. The EAC replaces the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and the Exchange Control Panel (ECP), which were the two interfaces that were used to manage Exchange Server 2010.

One of the advantages of having the web-based EAC is that you can partition access from the Internet/Intranet from within the ECP IIS virtual directory to allow or disallow management features. This allows you to permit or deny access to users trying to access the EAC from the Internet outside of your organizational environment, while still allowing access to an end-user’s Outlook Web App Options.

You won’t find the EMC in the Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 program group on your server’s Start menu
Exchange 2013 Preview does not have the traditional, MMC-based management tool.



Exchange Administration Center (EAC), a new web-based unified console that allows you to manage Exchange Server 2013 (on-premises), Exchange Online Preview organizations and hybrid deployments. You don’t need to install any admin tools on your management computer/workstation to use the EAC.


Accessing the EAC
Because the EAC is now a web-based management console, you will need to access it by using your web browser using the ECP virtual directory URL. To find the ECP virtual director URL that you need to access the EAC, run the following command:

Get-ECPVirtualDirectory | Format-List InternalURL,ExternalURL

You can access the EAC by going to . If you’ve been using Exchange 2010, the URL may sound familiar – it belongs to the Exchange Control Panel (ECP). In Exchange 2013 Preview, the same familiar URL lands you to the new web-based admin console that’s packed with functionality.

user must have permissions to login into EAC or will get below error


When you first log in to the EAC (if you’ve never logged into your mailbox), you’re presented with the familiar language/locale and timezone setting page.
If you’ve been using EMC in Exchange 2010 or Exchange 2007, you’ll be right at home with the EAC. Even if you’re not, it’s an easy web-based tool you can navigate through without much effort.



Common user interface elements in the EAC


Cross-premises navigation : The cross-premises navigation allows you to easily switch between your Exchange Online Preview and you’re on-premises Exchange deployments. If you don’t have an Exchange Online Preview organization, the link will direct you to the Office 365 Preview sign-up page.

Left navigation : This is the first level of navigation for most of the tasks that you will perform in the EAC. The left navigation control is similar to the console tree from the EMC in Exchange 2010. However, in Exchange 2013 Preview the left navigation control is organized by feature areas as opposed to server role and there are fewer clicks to find what you need.
Recipients Then Recipients center is where you’ll go to manage mailboxes, groups, resource mailboxes, contacts, shared mailboxes, and mailbox migrations and moves.

Permissions The Permissions center is where you’ll manage administrator roles, user roles, and Outlook Web App policies.

Compliance Management The Compliance Management center is where you’ll manage In-Place eDiscovery, In-Place Hold, Auditing, Data Loss Prevention, Retention Policies, Retention Tags, and Journaling.

Organization The Organization center is where you’ll manage the tasks that pertain to your Exchange Organization, including Federated sharing, Outlook Apps, and address lists.

Protection The Protection center is where you’ll manage the anti-malware protection for your organization.

Mail Flow The Mail Flow center is where you’ll manage rules, delivery reports, accepted domains, email address policies, and send and receive connectors.

Mobile The Mobile center is where you’ll manage the mobile devices that you allow to connect to your organization. You can manage mobile device access and policies.

Public Folders In Exchange 2010, you had to manage public folder by using the Public Folder Management Console, which was located outside of the EMC in the Toolbox. In Exchange 2013 Preview, public folders can be managed right from the Public Folders center.

Unified Messaging The Unified Messaging center is where you’ll manage UM dial plans and UM IP gateways.

Servers The Servers center is where you’ll manage your Mailbox and Client Access servers, databases, database availability groups, virtual directories, and certificates.

Hybrid The Hybrid center is where you’ll access Hybrid setup and configuration.

Tabs : The Tabs are your second level of navigation. Each of the left navigation centers will have tabs. Each tab represents a full feature. The only exception to this rule is the Hybrid center. You must first enable your organization for a hybrid deployment by using the Hybrid Configuration wizard.

Toolbar : When you click on most tabs, you’ll see a toolbar. The toolbar has icons that have a specific action. The following table describes the icons and their actions.

Details pane
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The details pane allows you to select an object in the list view and to view information about that object. In some cases, like with Recipient objects, you can perform quick edit tasks. You can identify the quick edit tasks by the blue links. For example, in Recipients > Mailboxes, select a mailbox in the list view. In the details pane, you can enable an archive for that mailbox. You can also bulk edit quick tasks by holding down on the CTRL key and selecting objects. Selecting multiple mailboxes allows you to bulk update users’ contact information, organization, custom attributes, mailbox quota, Outlook Web App settings, and POP3 and IMAP settings.

Notifications
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The EAC in Exchange 2013 Preview now has a notification viewer for allowing you to view the status of long running processes and providing notifications when the process completes. In addition, for particularly long running processes such as a move requests, you can opt-in to receive email notifications.

Me tile and Help
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The Me tile allows you to sign out of the EAC and to sign in as a different user. From the Help drop-down menu, you can perform the following actions:
Help Click help to view the online help.

Disable Help bubble The Help bubble was a feature available in the ECP. The Help bubble displays contextual help for fields when you create or edit and object. You can turn off the Help bubble help or turn it on if it has been disabled.

Performance console Click this link to view the performance console.

[Paul C]

■New web-based Exchange Administration Center (EAC) delivers many benefits such as multi-platform support
■But it drops PowerShell learning tools and context-sensitive menus
■Given that the Exchange 2013 version of OWA supports context-sensitive menus, can we hope that Microsoft will soon restore this valuable feature?


EAC is in terms of presenting a modern browser-based management interface that works well across multiple platforms (I’m not quite sure whether we’ll see many administrators running EAC on their iPads or Microsoft Surface devices, but time will tell), it also drops another important UI feature in that the right-click context-sensitive menus that EMC supports are not present.

Sure, there are UI elements to take up the slack, usually in the form of buttons that you can click on to perform an action, but context-sensitive menus are a really nice way of exposing the appropriate set of actions that you can take to work with an object in its current state. For example, if you select a mailbox database, you can right click to see options such as “dismount the database.”

This doesn’t happen in EAC with the apparent logic being that all of the available options are clearly available as a set of icons

(see the screen shot above – the icons are shown above the list of objects, in this case a set of retention tags) in addition to an information pane displaying details of the selected object on the right-hand side. I don’t buy this argument as the icons are quite small and might confuse novice administrators. But wait! (Blinding flash of insight occurs.) There are no more novice Exchange 2013 as they’ve all moved to Office 365. But wait encore! (Second moment of inspiration.) That theory is so much smelly horse manure because Exchange Online is slated to use EAC once Microsoft deploys Exchange 2013 in their Office 365 datacenters.

■New Exchange 2013 management console eliminates many of the sins of the previous Exchange Management Console
■But it's missing the invaluable insight into Exchange cmdlets and syntax that EMC provides in Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010
■On the other hand, Exchange 2013 is smarter about processing pipelined cmdlets, so it's not all bad

As you might have realized from Exchange 2013 Preview, Exchange 2013 dispenses with the MMC-based administrative console that’s been part of the product since Exchange 2000. I don’t shed many tears about this development because Exchange 2010’s Management Console (EMC) had become slow and unwieldy. Some might even apply the “fat, dumb, and happy” label to EMC, but I wouldn’t go quite that far even though the console went through some choppy waters after Microsoft shipped IE9 and EMC didn’t function quite as well as expected.

The IE9 bug developed into a long-running fiasco that took Microsoft a surprising length of time to fix, but that’s not the reason why they decided to chop EMC from Exchange 2013. The more pressing requirement was to create a unified browser-based management platform that was common across on-premises and cloud deployments. The Exchange Control Panel (ECP) proved the essential concepts for both Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online but its functionality was limited. For example, you couldn’t even create a new mailbox with ECP. Server management was also a notable omission. This was understandable because customers don’t need to manage servers when they subscribe to Office 365 and Microsoft's immediate development priority was to create a UI to manage Exchange Online.

Exchange 2013 includes a new browser-based management console called Exchange Administration Center (EAC). It’s a much-enhanced console that builds on the principles established by ECP such as RBAC-controlled UI display and support for multiple browsers. In fact, EAC is a pretty impressive replacement for both EMC and ECP.

EMC includes three tools that help administrators become acquainted with EMS cmdlets and syntax. The EMC wizards show the EMS code that they execute to perform a function such as creating a new distribution group; all of the commands executed by EMC can be captured in a log; and you can view the commands that EMC will execute to update objects when viewing their properties. Collectively these are fantastic ways to learn about EMS. In fact, you can cut and paste code from EMC into Notepad or another editor to create the basis of scripts that can be used to manage Exchange

On the other hand, Exchange 2013 does fix a bug that PowerShell scripters might have run into during the transition from local PowerShell (as used in Exchange 2007) to remote PowerShell (as used in Exchange 2010 and 2013). Scripts that worked in Exchange 2007 sometimes didn’t work with Exchange 2010 because of a difference in pipeline processing. Workarounds existed, but the bug frustrated administrators when carefully crafted code didn’t work as expected.

For example, the following code* doesn’t work in Exchange 2010:

Get-Content Users.txt | Get-Mailbox |% {$_.EmailAddresses.add("smtp:$($_.SamAccountname)@contoso.com"); Set-Mailbox -Identity:$_.Identity -EmailAddresses:$_.EmailAddresses}

This is a rather nice example of the power (no pun intended) of a single (complex) line of code that reads a list of user names from a text file, fetches the current set of proxy email addresses, and adds a new “contoso.com” SMTP email address to each mailbox.

In any case, because of improvements made to the way that EMS processes pipelines containing multiple Exchange cmdlets, the code works just fine in Exchange 2013. Despite the gloom of losing a valuable insight into EMS through the management console, Exchange 2013 gives something back in another area. Things aren’t quite so bad after all.