ARKES Reports Primer

ARKES reports about various objects in Microsoft Exchange architecture such as organization, administrative group, routing group, servers, connectors, protocols, information stores and recipients. ARKES provides several out-of-the-box reports about Exchange Server objects' configuration, security and usage. The information about the organization’s administrative groups, routing groups, storage groups, mailbox stores, public folder stores, system & recipient policies, protocols settings and various connectors, mailbox users, mail-enabled users and distribution groups/lists are available across all Exchange Servers in the Exchange Organization.
 

ARKES provides the following major reporting features to address different users' reporting requirements - Built-in Reports and Power Reports.
 

Built-in Reports: Presents a set of pre-canned reports classified based on Exchange objects for each viewing, print, export and e-mail.

Power Reports: Powerful tool to generate multiple reports at periodic intervals in a single task. Create a scheduled task to export multiple reports from ARKES to MS-Access (MDB), MS-Excel (XLS), HTML, PDF, TIFF and Comma Separated Values (CSV) file formats. Power Reports internally uses the familiar Windows task scheduler for generating reports at different time intervals - daily, monthly, weekly etc. Export multiple reports in four simple steps:

1. Select Directory Server to generate the reports on
2. Select the Reports
3. Specify Scope and Delivery Options and
4. Schedule the Export Task.

ARKES reports configuration information of all directory objects (Policy, Mailbox and Public Folder Store, Mailbox, Distribution Group, Contact, Public Folder, etc) under the respective objects in the Built-in Reports structure.
 

ARKES Built-in Reports features reports about the following Exchange objects:

1. Policy

2. Storage Group

3. Server

4. Mailbox and Public Folder Store 

5. Mailbox 

6. Distribution Group 

7. Contact 

8. Public Folder.

Please refer to the section Built-in-Reports for more information.
 

• Exchange View Only Administrator role in the Exchange Organization

• For Security reports:

  • 'Exchange Administrator' role in the Organization container/respective object
• To include Hidden recipient in any report - Connect using "Specify user account" option with Exchange Server admin credentials

ARKES reports about Mailbox and Public Folder resources (including Size, Number of mail items, Storage limits, Mailbox Folder Activity, Client Permissions, etc) as part of Recipient Reports. The following reports about mailbox and public folder resources have additional requirements to generate the reports:
 

1. Mailboxes - Size
2. Mailbox - First activity and last activity
3. Mailbox Default Folder Security Report
4. Mailbox Folders Properties
5. Mailbox Attachments Summary
6. Mailboxes exceeding quota limits
7. Public Folders Size
8. Public Folder Client Permissions
9. Mailbox Store Resource Utilization
10. Public Folder Store Resource Utilization

The above mentioned reports use a combination of user credentials to deliver the reports containing directory configuration information such as Alias Name, First Name, Last Name, E-mail Address, etc and Information Store (Mailbox & Public Folder Store) information such as Size, Total Number of Items, etc. For these specific set of reports, the 'specified credential during Connect' will be used to retrieve Directory Service information and 'currently logged on user' will be used to retrieve Information Store information. These reports additionally require a Mailbox Profile to retrieve the Information Store information.
 

In order to run the mailbox and public folder resource reports successfully, the user credential and mailbox profile should meet the following requirements, over and above the permission requirements stated before:
 

1. The mailbox profile used to generate the reports must be created in the user context in which the application is to run. In other words, the currently logged on user context should be able to use that mailbox profile and launch Microsoft Outlook or any other MAPI client application to view the mailboxes' contents.

2. Currently logged on user has must have 'Full mailbox access' right for the mailbox associated with the given profile for Exchange Server.

3. The user account that you specify in the mailbox profile should have Admin permissions in the Mailbox / Public Folder Store object in Exchange Server.

4. The user context in which ARKES application is run should have Admin permissions in the Mailbox / Public Folder Store object in Exchange Server.

Read more info about Configuring mailbox rights and public folder permissions

Apart from the above, other basic checks include:
 

• Information Store service is started

• Mailbox/Public Folder Store is mounted

Hence, in order to generate the mailbox and public folder resource reports successfully, login as any user say 'DOMAIN \ USER NAME', create a mailbox profile using that account and run ARKES by specifying the relevant profile and generate the reports.
 

If you have any restrictions in logging in with a different user account to generate these reports, you can use the Power Reports feature in ARKES to create multiple scheduled tasks and have it to run under corresponding user contexts. Using the Power Reports you can create a scheduled task and specify the user account in 'Run As' parameter of scheduled task to generate the reports for the selected Directory Server.
 

ARKES allows users to export, e-mail and print the reports from its various features.
 

ARKES facilitates export / e-mail of available reports in MS-Access (MDB), MS-Excel (XLS), HTML, PDF, TIFF and Comma Separated Values (CSV) file formats. 
 

Using Export feature, the generated reports can be saved in the respective file formats in the default export folder ('Export' folder in the application data path of ARKES). The export folder can be modified to a local folder or remote shared folder as desired.
 

Using E-mail feature, the generated reports can be e-mailed in the respective file formats to different mail-enabled recipient objects in the organization.
 

ARKES Preview feature allows preview of report before printing. The Print feature allows printing of reports directly to the printer configured in the computer running ARKES. ARKES uses the printer settings as available in the selected Printer's properties.