Our work with CMS Products

CMS Products - MS Exchange Backup and Restore Solution (www.cmsproducts.com)

Issue:
CMS Products provides backup/restore and recovery solutions for business users. According to CMS, email is a critical component in the backup strategy for any small business, and it was necessary to include an email solution as part of their BounceBack product.  
When CMS Products approached Softjourn, they had released a Small Business Server solution, but the product did not handle the backup and restore of MS Exchange Server. They were evaluating a build vs buy option for adding this functionality to their product.
There were several requirements for the new backup/restore solution, including:
  • Easy to use, and requiring minimal or no user intervention.
  • The solution had to backup the entire exchange post office without shutting down the service. Needed temp files, buffers, etc. should be backed up so that no errors occur. The backed up files should be usable by the Exchange application at its backed up location.
  • The solution had to restore the entire backed up Exchange data to the server without errors. After the files are restored, no further processing, or cleanup should be required.
  • Needed to work with multiple versions of MS Exchange: 2003, 2007, 2010.
  • Needed to work with MS Server versions: 2003, 2008.
  • Cover both 32 bit and 64 bit platforms.
Solution:
Softjourn was able to research and suggest a solution for the backup/restore module which was accepted by CMS. "The project with CMS Products was very interesting and challenging!" according to Yevgeniy Vershynin, Softjourn's project lead, "The challenge was that the backup version had to work across multiple versions of MS Exchange and multiple MS Server versions".
In a usual situation a good solution may be to use the Streaming Backup technology of Exchange 2007, but with Exchange 2010, this technology was no longer supported. Another option was to use Volume Shadow Copy Service(VSS). All of the versions of MS Exchange, that need to be supported for this project, can perform a backup using VSS technology. VSS also gives the best performance and requires less administrative work because VSS is supplied out of the box by Microsoft Windows and Exchange Servers.
Due to the differences in the SDK’s between Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Yevgeniy and his team suggested the use of a special open source library (AlphaVSS) which enables VSS Requester to write to any Windows server. The application developed included several buttons and boxes to select the required databases for backup and for backup or restore actions. Additionally Softjourn developed a special API to perform the backup and restore actions of all or selected Microsoft Information Stores.
Result:
The result is a backup module ready to be integrated with CMS Products’ BounceBack application. The module is easy to use and requires minimal user intervention. Softjourn also created a sample of how to test and use this module for Exchange Server. CMS performed the final integration with their BounceBack product and are set to release a new version in QI 2011.
 
"I would recommend Softjourn, I like the response, feedback and willingness to accommodate our needs!"  Les Kristof, VP of Engineering - CMS Products.
Technologies:
Programming language: C# .Net 3.5
IDE: Visual Studio 2008
MS Technologies: Windows Server 2003/2008; Microsoft Exchange Server 2003/2007/2010; Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS); PowerShell
COM Objects: Collaboration Data Objects (CDO); CDO for Exchange Management (CDOEXM)