Tag: exchange 2010 new features

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New features of Exchange 2010


Microsoft Exchange 2010 is nearly here so I’ve just been going through some of the free e-learning that’s available (here) to see what’s new.

Unified Communications:

There have been many improvements around the Unified Messaging piece including:

SMS Notification of missed calls

Message waiting indicators

Personal Auto Attendant

Users can have voicemail transcribed into their chosen language

Voice mails are now protected from unauthorised forwarding, copying and extracting

These enhancements should lead to the UC aspects of Exchange gaining more traction. Previously they’ve been seen as quite superfluous and “nice to have” rather than a “need to have” (at least in my experience); now however the user productivity gains are apparent.

Another big one is Federated Calendar Sharing, allowing you to easily share info with 3rd party organisations, using Windows Live as the trust broker. You need an internet accessible Client Access Server (CAS) as calendar sharing is done via web services – thusno special ports need opening.

Microsoft Clustering Services are no longer needed to get High Availability (HA) with Exchange 2010.

Things to know for deployment:

Can upgrade from 2003 to 2010

AD must be at least in

Windows Server 2003 forest functionality mode

Also, you must have at least one Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 Global Catalog server in every Active Directory site that will have an Exchange 2010 server.

Note that Read-only domain controllers (RODC) and read-only global catalog (ROGC) servers are not supported.

Exchange 2010 does NOT support in place upgrades.

Read-only domain controllers (RODC) and read-only global catalog (ROGC) servers are not supported

Storage:

Microsoft have made a number of changes in this area and, at least to me, they seem like great improvements. They’ve worked hard to reduce the I/O traffic and this is done via:

IOPS changed to write more data at fewer intervals

Merged I/O instances

Both of these reduce the number of operations and improving performance. Two more improvements include:

Larger cache size (32kb)

Sequential data storage reduces I/O

They have also removed the Database maintenance windows by pushing the defrag process into the background.

All that and more, along with moving diagrams and voiceovers can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/training/exchange-server.aspx

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A look at Exchange 2010


I’ve been looking around the Microsoft New Efficiency site (blog post here) today and there are a number of great videos giving an overview and introduction to the new features of Exchange 2010. One of the key ideologies behind the new version of Exchange has been that it will behave the same whether it’s on-site or hosted in the cloud. The slide below shows the main pillars of Exchange 2010:

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The following screenshots go into more detail on the features behind the above:

 

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You’ll see here that Exchange 2010 now has integrated archiving capabilities. As you can see below, it gives users a 2nd mailbox which can be used to store archived data with all the familiarity and ease of Outlook.

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It also has a new “Legal Hold” feature which tracks all edits etc on a user’s email-even those that are deleted.

Other features/news:

I saw this week that Exchange 2010 has the ability to migrate users during an upgrade (from 2007) without any downtime! A huge bonus to System Admins everywhere 🙂

Outlook Web Access is now called Outlook Web App, so still the same initials but it shows a different approach. Rather than it simply being a way to get your emails when you’re without Outlook…it is now a proper, defined entity in it’s own right. That is also shown by the fact that OWA 2010 will have around 95% feature parity with the full Outlook client. I don’t know what the percentage is currently but certainly in my opinion OWA 2007 is lacking a lot; so roll on OWA 2010! This will be of big interest to people looking at Exchange Online aswell…

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