Oliver Sommer 
2008-06-26

The first publically available Windows Essential Business Server Add-In not developed by Microsoft itself, the 'Configuration Partition Editor', has reached beta status and is testable via our "Giving away free EBS Domain-Admin Accounts for EVERYONE!" call to action on the Blog and for those who want to test this on there own environments via the download link on the bottom of this article.

The AddIn enables EBS administrator to easily check and edit the EBS Configuration Data stored in Active Directory in a seperate AD partition during initial setup of Essential Business Server. I.e. the IP adresses and names of all servers are stored in that AD partition, but are not updated in AD automatically if those values change in the productive environment. (i.e. you may have used the mmsutil tool to change the IP Address of one of the EBS servers after soem time for whatever reason).
If you are then using the "setup in replacement mode" procedure to replace one of the EBS servers later on, it will be reinstalled by setup using the outdated settings in the AD configuration partition.

By now the 'Configuration Partition Editor' enables Administrators to export the current data to an XML file, view and edit the settings stored in AD

Steffen Hoppe (SH-Soft.de) and I developed this Add-In during the last days and are proude to present this Add-In as the first public available Add-In for the Essential Business Server administration console.

See a screenshoot of the Add-In in it's current status below:

Planed functions for future milestone releases:

• Setup routine to install Add-in easily
• Import of formerly exported data
• monitoring of current live values
• Storing monitored values to AD
• help function for each value | aka "What's that for?" (we'd apreciate any help in writing those help texts)

Download Add-in Beta release