Question : Problem: Backup Exec Alerts

Hi Guys,

I have various clients with numerous servers. each with many different versions of backup exec.

As an IT Service Desk company, we maintain these backups. On a daily basis we must create reports. We create reports by firstly checking the shared mailbox for email alerts, if no alerts have come in we check the servers manually.

The current setup in place is very messy, as alerts are coming in with various subject lines and from various email addresses.

My question is, what is the best approach for handling this situation.

My ideal setup would be the emails come from the same email address for each client. regardless of which server it came from. So would i create an account in AD that handles every Backup exec operation on Every server, thus when the alert is sent to the mailbox, it will have the same "from" field for each ??

Secondly, can the subject line of these alerts be configured so i can sort the emails in outlook to provide an alphabetical order of the alerts? as each client has 30 or so servers, its very difficult sifting through the mess of emails when filling out the report in excel for the backups.

Thirdly, can the content of each email alert, whether it be a Job Completed or Job Failed, be edited ? because ultimately i would like to setup outlook rules to scan each email and somehow automatically create a report based on the "From" field, then the "Subject Line" to get the server name, and finally the "email content". using each of these setups is it then possible to have some sort of excel-outlook sync to automatically generate a nice looking report ???

Thank you for you help in advance

Answer : Problem: Backup Exec Alerts

You cannot edit the SUBJECT line or the contents of the emails being received as notification from BEWS
in order to have a common sender email i would recommend the following

Create an AD account with an active and unique mailbox
The requirement for a unique name comes from the MAPI limitation for Exchange backups
if you are not backing up exchange resources you can ignore the UNIQUE part

Make  the account a member of the Domain Admin group
Configure all backup exec servers to use the account as the default,system and service account