Thursday, May 28, 2009

Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 available in Q3 2009

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is the industry's leading server for e-mail, calendaring and unified messaging. Exchange Server 2007 is the foundation for a dynamic and holistic unified communications experience, and has been designed to meet the challenges and address the messaging needs of today's businesses. Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) enables customers to increase their operational efficiency and it sets the foundation for the transition to Exchange Server 2010, which is expected to be available in the second half of 2009. A public beta of Exchange Server 2010 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010.

Customer Benefits

Key new features of Exchange Server 2007 SP2 unveiled today include:

  • Enhanced Auditing - New Exchange auditing events and audit log repository enable Exchange administrators to more easily audit the activities occurring on their Exchange servers. It allows the right balance of granularity, performance, and easy access to audited events via a dedicated audit log repository. This simplifies the auditing process and makes review of audited events easier by segregating audited events in a dedicated location.
  • Exchange Volume Snapshot Backup Functionality - A new backup plug-in has been added to the product that will enable customers to create Exchange backups when a backup is invoked through the Windows Server 2008 Backup tool. Exchange Server 2007 didn't have this capability on Windows Server 2008 and additional solutions were required to perform this task.
  • Dynamic Active Directory Schema Update and Validation - The dynamic AD schema update and validation feature allows for future schema updates to be dynamic deployed as well as proactively preventing conflicts whenever a new property is added to the AD schema. Once this capability is deployed it will enable easier management of future schema updates and will prevent support issues when adding properties that don't exist in the AD schema.
  • Public Folder Quota Management - SP2 enables a consistent way to manage quotas by improving the current PowerShell cmdlets to perform quota management tasks.
  • Centralized Organizational Settings - SP2 introduces new PowerShell option that enable centralized management of many of the Exchange organization settings.
  • Named Properties cmdlets - SP2 enables Exchange administrators to monitor their named property usage per database.
  • New User Interface for Managing Diagnostic Logging- SP2 enables Exchange administrators to easily configure and manage diagnostic logging from within the Exchange Management Console.
Source: http://bink.nu/news/exchange-server-2007-service-pack-2-available-in-q3-2009.aspx

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Update Rollup 8 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1

We have released Update Rollup 8 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (KB 968012) to the download center. The release of the rollup via Microsoft Update will happen on May 26.

As in the previous rollups, we have done a mix of product improvements (aka Critical Design Change Requests) and bug fixes. A few key ones which I would like to call out are as follows:

1. KB 969690 - We have fixed the bug introduced in Update Rollup 7 which caused the sender of the Delivery Status Notification (DSN) to be unresolved.
2. Disable kernel mode authentication in Windows Server 2008 for CAS servers - As documented here, it was required to manually take the additional step to configure the CAS servers running Windows Server 2008 to disable kernel mode authentication. Starting this rollup, the installer will configure this for you.
3. X-Header promotion to named properties- Change to the way X-headers are promoted to named properties. More on this in Jason Nelson's blog post Named Properties, X-Headers, and You.
4. KB 961606 - We have fixed a bug where Outlook Web Access (OWA) users may find that the font size of plain text messages is extremely small on third-party Web browsers.

KB 968012 has more details about this release and a complete list of all fixes included in this rollup.

As a follow up to the Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) announcement, all fixes in this Update rollup and the previous ones we have released for Exchange Server 2007 will be included with Exchange Server 2007 SP2. We will have a blog post soon which covers:

* When update rollups can be expected for Exchange 2007 SP2.
* Support plans for Exchange 2007 SP1 which will be in support as per the timeline in Microsoft's Service Pack Support Policy.

Source: msexchangeteam.com

Thursday, May 14, 2009

MailTips in Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010

The next iteration of Microsoft's email client and messaging and collaboration server under the Office 2010 brand umbrella will bring to the table a new feature dubbed MailTips. Designed to deliver information to end users about the recipients of their messages even before they start writing the emails, MailTips is set up to increase workflow, and avoid common faux pas scenarios. According to Microsoft, MailTips will be available to users of Office 2010, Outlook Web Access and Exchange 2010. The Redmond company underlined that the feature would not be tweaked to offer backward compatibility, and as such legacy Outlook/OWA releases would not be supported.

“Have you ever sent a really well thought out, important email, only to find out (through an automatic response) that the recipient is on vacation for two weeks? For most of us, this means either waiting two weeks for a response or emailing an alternate contact. For the recipient, it means dealing with tons of messages when returning from vacation,” revealed E.J. Dyksen, from the Exchange Transport team. “This scenario is one of the many reasons we developed MailTips in Exchange Server 2010. MailTips are there to give you information about your message and its recipients before you hit the send button.”

MailTip is of course capable of displaying automatic replies for recipients to emails, but the feature delivers additional functionality. In this regard, Dyksen informed that MailTips would alert the users if a message was about to be sent to a large audience, or of situations in which the Reply All options would confirm to other users that certain messages were indeed received. At the same time, MailTips is designed to alert the user on emails that are going to people outside a particular organization, if the recipient's inbox is full, if the message itself is oversized, but also on invalid or restricted email addresses.

Source:news.softpedia.com/news/MailTips-in-Outlook-2010-and-Exchange-2010-110554.shtml

Monday, May 11, 2009

New Features in Exchange 2010

Here are the important changes you should know about:

* For starters, note the new orange color to the Exchange logo icon. It's not a technical facet of the new version but good to note, nonetheless.
* In Exchange 2007, clicking Microsoft Exchange at the top gave you Finalize Deployment and End-to-End Scenario tabs. In the Exchange 2010 beta, you get nothing when you click Microsoft Exchange; instead, you have to click Microsoft Exchange On-Premises to see the Finalize Deployment, Post-Installation Tasks, and Community and Feedback tabs. Also note a little option in the Actions pane called Gather Organizational Information; it kicks off a wizard that collects your organization's data for the number of servers, mailboxes, server roles, and licensing summary.
* Clicking the Organization Configuration top branch in Exchange 2007 shows you Exchange administrators and their roles. The Exchange 2010 beta displays three tabs: Federation Trusts, Sharing Relationships, and Sharing Policies. They may seem a bit cryptic if you don't understand the new concept of federation, which amounts to trust of other domains. Clicking the New Federation Trust wizard tells Echange 2010 to create a federation trust with Windows Live to prepare for secure sharing of information with external Exchange organizations. This requires a certificate for federation being deployed on all Exchange servers with client access and hub server role.
* Clicking Mailbox under Organization Configuration offers some new tabs in the Exchange 2010 beta, such as Database Management (which formerly resided under Server Configuration | Mailbox) and Database Availability Group. The Database Availability Group options are exciting to work with because they relate to your High Availability and Disaster Recovery options. Creating a New Database Availability Group launches a wizard that defines a set of servers that provide automatic database-level recovery from database failure. Note that Storage Groups are gone in favor of these new Database Availability Groups (DAGs). Also note some major changes to the High Availability options: specificall, LCR, and SCC are no longer available.
* Clicking Client Access under the Organization Configuration branch shows that ActiveSync policies are still around, and it offers a new set of policies called Outlook Live Mailbox Policies.
* For the most part, the Hub Transport settings look the same. But there are some new transport-policy settings worth looking into. One is If the Sender and Recipient's AD Attribute Are Evaluation. I had a hard time figuring that one out until I actually created the rule and discovered that it lets you change the AD Attribute and the Evaluation. Give it a try, and you will understand.
* The Unified Messaging tabs under Organization are the same. However, after creating a dial plan and going into the properties, I noticed some interesting changes: a check box on the General tab for Allow Voice Mail Preview and another one for Allow Users to Configure Personal Auto Attendants. One of the biggest interface changes I noticed when clicking through was in the UM policy settings on the General tab; new check boxes include Allow Message Waiting Indicator and Allow Play on Phone. There is also a Protected Voice Mail tab to help enforce options that may involve legal requirements for a company (for example, some companies are required to play a message on phone and not through a computer's speakers for confidentiality's sake).
* Moving on to Server Configuration. If you select this branch, you now see Exchange Certificates, which Exchange 2007 did not have. You can create a new certificate, assign services to certificates, or import/export certificates.
* Under Mailbox for Server Configuration, you see Database Copies.
* Client Access under Server Configuration holds the same four tabs as in Exchange 2007 for OWA, POP, and IMAP4, Exchange ActiveSync, and Offline Address Book Distribution.
* Under the Recipient Configuration branch is a new option called Mailbox Migration. In clicking through the properties of a mailbox user, I noticed a few interesting changes. There is a Calendar Settings tab where you can enable the Calendar Attendant and make some quick modificaitons such as Remove Meeting Forward Notifications to the Deleted Items Folder and Remove Old Meeting Requests and Responses without having to create entire policies for them. I didn't see too much else that was different other than a Federated Sharing option for a sharing policy on the Mailbox Settings tab.
* Last but not least, the Toolbox: On the surface, the two versions' interfaces match up perfectly. There are no new tools, it seems. No doubt the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer is newer. I couldn't find, however, some of my options for managing databases and working with Recovery Storage Groups.

Source: infoworld.com

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Exchange Server 2010 Beta Tips

On April 15, Microsoft released a public beta of Exchange Server 2010, formerly code-named Exchange 14. I've had the opportunity to spend a lot of time working with the new version of Exchange since before the public beta, and I thought I'd share a few tips and tricks that might be useful to you.

First of all, don't even think of installing the beta in production. It's not supported or licensed for production use, and there's no guarantee that you'll be able to upgrade from this beta to later betas (if any) or to the release version. Nino Bilic on the Exchange team blog also has something to say about this point.

Second, keep in mind the prerequisites you'll need to download and install before you install the Exchange 2010 beta. I had hoped that Exchange 2010 would automate installation (or at least downloading) of the prerequisite updates it requires, but it doesn't. Microsoft's Scott Schnoll posted a step-by-step installation guide on his blog that you can use as a guide. There are two sets of prerequisites: Windows features that you must have installed, such as the Windows RPC over HTTP proxy server for the Client Access server role; and patches or updates to existing features, including Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and the latest version of the Windows Remote Management (WinRM) management service.

Third: Exchange 2010 requires PowerShell 2.0, which supports remote management. When you use the Exchange Management Shell link on the Windows Start menu, you're actually getting a remote PowerShell session on the same machine. In some cases, remote PowerShell sessions don't start properly. If that happens, look in the Start menu again and you'll see an Exchange Management Shell (Local PowerShell) link. Use it instead, and you'll be in good shape.

Exchange Server 2010 beta by Microsoft

Source: windowsitpro