E-mail management vendor DYS Analytics later this month will release a desktop performance-monitoring tool that provides corporations with usage statistics and analytical data to help troubleshoot and manage Microsoft Exchange.

The company's Email Control Desktop Edition for Microsoft Exchange includes two modules: TrackNow for real-time analysis of user status and message routing, and InvestigateNow for historical reporting on user activity and usage.

The software is based on DYS Analytics' Control management software, an e-mail management tool that requires the use of a back-end database. The desktop version does not have that same requirement and is targeted at midsize businesses that need management tools but not at the expense of deploying a full database.

The software installs on an administrators computer and uses Microsoft's stand-alone Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE) database for storage of data.

"We wanted to monitor who was on Exchange, who were our biggest users, who was sending the most e-mail, things like that," says Dave Vigneau, network services manager for Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H. Vigneau couldn't afford an expensive SQL Server deployment, but he got what he was after. With the software Vigneau found hundreds of inactive accounts and their bloated mailboxes and deleted them from the e-mail server. He then found all his users over their mailbox size quota and sent them a letter asking them to clean up their in-box. Control Desktop Edition also helped him discover that he had oversized the drives in his storage-area network that supports Exchange, a mistake he says he won't make on the next upgrade.

Control Desktop Edition works without placing any agents on an Exchange server. Once installed, the software discovers all the Exchange servers on the network and begins collecting data on the flow of messages to and from the server.

"We are focused on the user level. We look at how the user is interacting and not into the server analytics," says Andrew Wolff, vice president of products for DYS Analytics. "We solve some immediate administrative stuff like, 'Who is sending out those huge messages?"

The software competes with similar products from vendors including NetIQ, Quest and some features of Microsoft Operations Manager.

Control Desktop Edition runs on Windows 2000, XP and 2003. It supports Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003 and is priced at $4,995 per installation.