Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

If you’re that sort of person who’s into mail, you’ve probably heard and used Exchange at some point in your life. What you’ve probably not heard much about is the Exchange Server 2010 Beta.

You could be forgiven any thoughts of why; Exchange 2007 has only just recently emerged, and it’s not all that popular – especially given the uptake that we’ve seen with our current and prospective clients. You might even be considered for considering it as a service pack. However, when you delve into it you can see that it’s definately more than that.

There are some pretty cool features making their way into Exchange 2010, and we certainly hope that they all make the cut:

1. OWA supports Firefox and Safari, out of the box.
2. OWA now has a “conversation view”, much like the Threaded view available in other mail clients.
3. MailTips – a brand new feature for OWA (and Outlook 2010) that warns you if you’re about to do something silly. Check out this entry from MS Exchange Team Blog (You had me at EHELO) for more.
4. The ability to move a mailbox, online. We can finally moe a mailbox, and not take out the user’s access to it!
5. Mail Moderation – you can redirect incoming mail to a manager, allowing any incoming mail to be vetted before sending it onto the recipient. All sorts of legal ramifications there, we think, but very cool nonetheless.
6. Users can archive direct to a secondary mailbox, rather than littering the network with PST files, or needing the use of other Mailbox Archivers, such as Redgate’s ESA.
7. Users can now manage their own distribution groups.
8. Multimailbox search allows specified users to search across multple mailboxes (useful for HR or other purposes we’d imagine).

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that’s in there, but unless you’re a hardcore system administrator we’re genuinely not sure that it’ll be that interesting. But if you are read on.

• IO optimization, which means that Exchange runs much more nicely on SATA disks. I’m still not 100% sure that’s a fantastic feature – after all, you are using proper disks in your Exchange box? Right?
• Replicated mailbox databases allow for the use of concatenated disks instead of insisting on RAID arrays
• Database-level failover (quite frankly, this is awesome)
• Page patching, which automatically repairs corrupted database pages from copies
• Automatic repair of corrupted database pages from copies
• Voice mail previews (if you have unified messaging facilities) allow you to access your voicemails, automatically transcribed into text
• “Federations” (too much Trek for the engineer who came up with this name) allows you to more easily trust Exchange servers of partner organizations, facilititating sharing calendars, etc.

We’re quite sure that there’s a whole lot more in there – we’ve just not had the time or opportunity to find it yet!

This entry was posted by Karl on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 5:29 pm and is filed under General. 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.