Wired Life in the Roanoke Valley

Ray Mohrman gave a repeat of his session on the upcoming changes in Exchange 2007 SP1 (UNC302) to a sparsely populated room early on Friday afternoon. I guess by this time many people were too busy standing in line at the TechED baggage debacle or contemplating how to get to the airport. I know that TechED is wrapping up because I have just seen the first “best/worst of TechED 2007” post on technetbloggers.net.

Microsoft began the development of Exchange 2007 and SP1 with three main audiences in mind, the IT Decision Makers, the Employees, and the IT Professionals. Decision makers want high availability and compliance, employees want access from anywhere, and IT Pros want less complex, less expensive, technology that is easy to manage. The development of SP1 began in the second half of 2006 and the early beta release was done in Q2 of 2007. The third quarter of 2007 will bring the Customer Technology Preview and the RTM should come a little later, towards the end of the year.

Areas of focus in SP1:

• Anywhere Access
• Operational Efficiency
• Built-in Protection

Anywhere Access Changes

Service Pack 1 will provide public folder access and S/MIME support in OWA and integration with Office Communications Server 2007.

Personal distributions lists, public folder access, rules editor and wizard, custom forms and fields, recover deleted items, monthly calendar view, S/MIME support, additional language spell check, and Office 2007 document converters are all available now in Exchange 2007 SP1.

Operational Efficiency

New features in SP1 include the ability to export mailboxes with powershell and there are some management console improvements such as delegate management, folder level permissions, ID translation, and more.

Public folder management has also been simplified in the Exchange Management Console. Recipient configuration has also been streamlined allowing protocol configuration within the management console.

These improvements require Windows 2003 SP2 so make sure to upgrade your Exchange 2007 boxes to SP2 before trying to get all the functionality by upgrading to Exchange 2007 SP1.

Built-in Protection

Service Pack 1 introduces standby continuous replication and advanced security for government deployments.

S/MIME in OWA, mobile remote wipe confirmation (so you can sleep easy) , the addition of SCR, IRM pre-fetching by transport, and Defense Message Support (DMS) additions are all available in SP1.

SCR uses a log file shipping technology just like LCR and CCR. It is designed for site resilience and is: replicated on a per-storage group basis, the source can be standalone or clustered, the destination can be standalone or clustered, and it required manual activation. Manual activation, among other things, requires changes in DNS.

You could provide site resilience with CCR with a stretched VLAN. Adding SCR to CCR provides more complete coverage. CCR in the primary datacenter provides high availability, add an SCR server in a standby datacenter and now you have site resilience.

Advances the Platform

Exchange SP1 adds Windows Server 2003 SP2 support, web services extensions, and it adds the Exchange 2007 pillars (anywhere access, operational efficiency, and built-in protection) and overall Exchange 2007 value.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Conference Sessions, Exchange 2007, Microsoft, TechED, TechED 2007, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.