When I started looking at EBS I was impressed with one tool, the upgrade wizard, which checked the current infrastructure before the upgrade to EBS. I thought that Microsoft should include this in every Server OS they released – it was just that good! They didn’t do that unfortunaly: they did the second best thing. The EBS team created a stand-alone product, “Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner”, which builds on the wizard from EBS.

The tool runs some hundreds of checks on your network, and the checks are based on the most common questions that were recieved by Microsoft Support Services. The software is not bound to EBS in any way so it can be used on all Active Directory networks. The main areas where testing is done is Configuration of sites and subnets in Active Directory, Replication of Active Directory, the file system, and SYSVOL shared folders, Name resolution by the Domain Name System (DNS), Configuration of the network adapters of all domain controllers, DNS servers, and e-mail servers running Microsoft Exchange Server , Health of the domain controllers, Configuration of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) for all domain controllers.

And if this tool identifies something – as I always tell my students – fix it! Yellow exclamation points perhaps looks colourful. But they are not good. Every error, even a small one, should be fixed. So get going; check your environment now:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dd7a00df-1a5b-4fb6-a8a6-657a7968bd11&displaylang=en