Microsoft 1 manual Scripting Minor and Standard Changes

42Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0

Figure 3.1

The Change Management Process

Minor and Standard Changes

The advantage of minor and standard changes is that individuals with less authority can be pre-assigned the permissions to perform them. This is perfectly fine, because the changes themselves are not likely to cause significant problems when implemented. Of course, the change manager, and perhaps the change advisory board will, at some point, have deter- mined whether a particular change is minor or standard. However, once this is done and the nature of the change is documented, the change owner can be pre-authorized to either perform the change in person or to delegate that authority to another person.

A classic example of a standard change is the addition of a user. This type of change should have been anticipated, so the change manager will have already pre-authorized the change owner to be responsible for this change. The change should be thoroughly docu- mented with standard settings for items such as mailbox size limits and deleted item retention time.

Scripting Minor and Standard Changes

Although minor and standard changes do not take very long, they are among the most repetitive of tasks and therefore the ones most likely to benefit from automation.

To further reduce the amount of time spent on these tasks, you may want to consider using automated tools. Using the example of mailbox creation, the change advisory board may have previously categorized users according to job role. There would be a series of pre- defined settings for each type of user. Administrators could then use a Web-based tool to create the users, specifying the job role. Scripts would run against Active Directory to place