Examining the Scan Report
Before I talk about the scan report, I want to point out that you shouldn't rush into making changes according to ExBPA's results. You can easily break things by blindly tweaking settings, so resist the temptation to immediately fix everything that ExBPA reports. Wait until you've researched the suggested settings and understand the impact of any changes before you touch anything. In addition, remember that you might have made specific configuration changes that are right for your environment but that differ from ExBPA's recommendations—it's important to think before you accept all of ExBPA's suggestions.
That said, the first thing you'll see is a summary page that shows which servers ExBPA located, as Web Figure 2 shows. Each server will have an icon next to it that indicates whether the server was completely scanned, partially scanned, or not scanned at all. This summary view has a link that you can click to see a detailed report. When you click the link, the first report that you see by default is the Critical Issues list. As you'd expect, this list shows the items that you should probably focus on fixing first. If you don't find any items in this list, good for you! If you do see items in this list (e.g., SMTP relaying problems, page table entries, out-of-date Exchange binary files), you should plan to fix them after you understand what the fix entails.
A pulldown menu at the top of the page lets you select another report type: the Full Issues list, which is probably where most of us are likely to find at least one configuration problem flagged by ExBPA. For example, if you're not using WINS, you'll probably have a blank WINS primary address; if you have a blank address, ExBPA will flag it. If you haven't turned on crash upload logging, ExBPA will flag that too. Other issues that fall into this category include being behind on installing service packs, an SMTP queue configuration that differs from ExBPA's recommendation, and running Exchange on a DC. A detailed view of the Full Issues list shows you the same data with more information (such as the number of DCs and public folder stores found in the organization) and specifics. The detailed view lists all the settings that ExBPA checks, flagging those on your servers that don't match the recommendations in its rule set. Looking at this view is a good way to get a feel for exactly what ExBPA checks, although you can get the same information by inspecting the ExBPA.Config file.
Should you fix every item you see reported in the Full Issues category? Probably not. Many of the items ExBPA reports will actually be legitimate configuration choices you've made, such as running Exchange on a DC. In these cases, you can tell ExBPA to exclude the rules that you know your site doesn't meet, and it will ignore those rule violations in subsequent runs.
ExBPA archives its reports in the \Application Data\Microsoft\ExBPA subfolder of the logged-in user's Documents and Settings folder. The reports are XML, so you can parse them with your own XML tools or you can apply an Extensible Style Language Transformations (XSLT) style sheet to give them the appearance you want. If all you want is a simple HTML rendering, you can obtain that by selecting the Print to file option in the Print dialog box. You can also export and import ExBPA reports, as I mentioned earlier. Don't be surprised if you're asked to submit an ExBPA report the next time you call Microsoft PSS with an Exchange server problem.
Future Expectations
If you've been around Exchange a while, you've probably used the Exchange 5.5 Performance Wizard, which asks questions about the role your server plays and performs some simple performance analysis to try to determine the best configuration. Subsequent versions of Exchange are more self-tuning but don't give you a way to influence the tuning process or to find out whether the settings that you configure are correct. ExBPA reintroduces the concept of an automated analyzer that applies Microsoft's knowledge of best configuration practices to your servers. I expect continued updates to the ExBPA rule set, perhaps with a future extension that lets you have the tool automatically fix problems it finds.
ExBPA has some bugs (see "Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer Tool Known Issues" at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/exbpakil.mspx), and no doubt Microsoft will consider fixing these in ExBPA 2.0. In the meantime, though, you should definitely download and run the tool to see what it finds in your environment. ExBPA is an excellent addition to your arsenal of diagnostic tools, and over time I expect its use to become a best practice all its own.