Build an Exchange admin runbook in OneNote

Documentation is only useful if you can find it at 2 a.m. during an outage. OneNote is a good fit for an Exchange runbook: free-form pages, fast search across notebooks, and it is already part of Microsoft 365.

Store the notebook in the right place

Create the notebook in a SharePoint site or Microsoft Teams team owned by the messaging team rather than in someone's personal OneDrive. Access then follows the team, and the notebook survives people changing jobs.

Suggested structure

Use one notebook for the environment and keep the sections predictable:

• 00 Overview: servers, versions, DAGs, namespaces, URLs, contacts.
• Servers: one page per server, with subpages for history.
• Procedures: maintenance mode, certificate renewal, CU installation.
• Changes: one dated page per change.
• Incidents: one dated page per incident, with timeline and root cause.
• Hybrid & Exchange Online: connectors, migration batches, tenant settings.

Use page templates

Create a page with the layout you want for changes or incidents, then save it as a template from Insert > Page Templates (OneNote for Windows). A consistent layout makes pages faster to write and faster to read.

A simple change template:

Field	Value
Date / window
Servers
Risk & rollback
Commands run
Validation

Tags for follow-up

Mark open actions with the To Do tag (Ctrl+1 in OneNote for Windows) and questions with the Question tag. Use Find Tags to build a summary of everything still open across the notebook.

Link pages together

Type [[ followed by a page name and ]] to create a link to that page; if the page doesn't exist yet, OneNote creates it. Link each incident to the server page and the procedure you used.

Paste command output, not screenshots

Paste PowerShell output as text so it stays searchable: a search for a thumbprint, a queue name or an error message will find it later. See the Exchange health check article for commands worth pasting after each check.