Exchange server administrators, now what are you going to do?
Thought this would be a good Labor Day discussion, about how much labor an Exchange administrator performs. The short answer is, you’ll still be very needed if/when your company decides to move to Exchange online in O365.
So you think you’ll lose your job when your company moves Exchange on premises content into O365 using Exchange Online. Nope! If anything, you should plan to get even busier with day to day tasks and less hectic with after hour maintenance. In the field, when a customer moves to O365, it certainly feels like the Exchange administrators are getting busier than before. This could be partly because tasks have changed from less server specific operations, to an even stronger emphasis on the data within your organization. And busier than before, is not the proper way of saying, you’ll just be busier with different tasks than before, but less busy with the often-mundane responsibilities from the past. (No more BIOS batteries to swap out with a 4U server at the top of a rack! Thank goodness.)
Basically, what people are seeing in the field, staff that work with Exchange servers, are worried about more important company values, like security, Intellectual Property, access rules, etc. Yes, there are more possibilities of end user issues related to a service the company is only a tenant of, which networking seems to be the biggest emphasis in workload change. No longer are Exchange administrators only worried about their connection paths to/from the data center with their messaging servers, but to every single client machine/device supported by the entire organization. (Remote sites, VPN connections, internet egress points, network configuration across the company, mobile devices, etc.) These issues were of a concern before, but the shift in percentage of day to day tasks has transformed.
Naturally there is less Exchange server administration, but there is just as much, if not more, e-mail related work with: connections, provisioning, troubleshooting, compliance, security, application integration, searching, phishing attacks, spamming issues, and updating of changes to the data within the organization. Exchange administrators are the end of the support chain and the front end has changed and needs documentation to be updated. It is this cut over process that Exchange administrators are working more than before. Sometimes after the training/cut over process is complete, there could be a slowdown of old traditional tasks. However, since E-mail is part of O365, there usually is another large ramp up needed for interoperability across all of the available cloud technologies.
After you got over the fear of not being needed, the next thought is usually would you only get to do Exchange work or is the position now an ‘O365 Engineer’. You will most likely need to learn about other technologies within the O365 stack, such as: SharePoint, OneDrive, AAD connect, Azure Rights Management, networking, Delve, Office Pro Plus connection/authentication troubleshooting, tenant administration, Compliance, Security, OneNote, Sway, Teams, Planner, Yammer, Groups, Video, Stream, etc. You can still specialize in message related content, but morphing into understanding a bit more about the integration of the other products, will certainly make you more valuable.
Here is a compiled list of common tasks, that generally Exchange administrators perform at a typical company (not completely exhaustive). Whilst it may look like more onsite tasks in the list, many of those tasks are ‘old school’ in that a lot of the responsibilities are server or database maintenance related. Now that O365 is the steward of your servers, you don’t have to worry about that part of the job. Most companies don’t have actual steam engines in their basements generating electricity anymore, you pay a service. Now in O365, you don’t have to worry about the actual servers (patching, maintaining, hardware updates, etc.), you just manage your data in your environment, that will continue to grow and need additional resources to control and meet compliance regulations. You are the end of the support line for your organization and the process is changing and everyone continues to look to you as the most knowledgeable person to help the organization.
| Common tasks performed by engineers | Exchange on site | Exchange Hybrid (manage in both realms) | O365 Exchange online only |
| Capacity Management - move mailboxes, re-create databases, manage high number of capacity alert tickets, plan for storage, etc. | x | ||
| Monitor, sustain, and manage Exchange backups | x | ||
| Monthly patch management (change control documentation, testing of Windows updates, testing Exchange updates in lab, etc.) | x | ||
| Perform planned Exchange maintenance (Coordinate after hour patching, run Exchange server maintenance mode, fail over Active DB’s, etc.) | x | ||
| Troubleshooting unplanned server fail overs | x | ||
| Running old utilities, like ESEUTIL or ISINTEG | x | ||
| Resolve Public Folder database issues and monitor for PF storms | x | ||
| Journaling: Plan, support, sustain storage of messages, update servers | x | ||
| Journaling: Maintain and monitor mail flow compliance process | x | x | x |
| Resolve message delivery queue issues (message tracing) | x | x | x |
| Manage/update certificates | x | x | |
| Patch and maintain servers | x | x | |
| Troubleshoot LB routing, Firewall, and DNS issues with network team | x | x | x |
| Coordinate, test, and approve any LB routing, Firewall, and DNS changes affecting Exchange, with network team | x | x | x |
| Assist with network design for O365 best practices | x | x | |
| Manage Exchange transport rules | x | x | x |
| Providing Dashboard metrics /mail flow statistics for inbound and outbound messaging, including average message queue statistics | x | x | x |
| Assist with updating Tier I and Tier II troubleshooting support process and documentation | x | x | x |
| Provisioning accounts. Depending on the design, there can be a complete re-engineering of the provisioning process of accounts. | x | x | x |
| Troubleshooting unplanned network failures that connect to O365 | x | ||
| Compliance management, engineering, and maintaining setup for company (O365 has more features than on premises Exchange) | x | ||
| Full integration with all Office 365 applications (O365 groups) | x | ||
| Staying up with O365 changes, that occur, very quickly | x | ||
| View and implement new features quicker than ever | x | ||
| Run reports and scans in the Security and Compliance Center | x |
You can look at the empty spaces that you no longer must worry about and then look to the empty spaces you didn’t have to worry about before that are now filled with a greater range of work and effort needed. The one constant in IT is change and this is just another adaptation that us Exchange administrators will have to adapt as technology continues to evolve.
Thank you.