RTM by the end of 2010

Apr 7, 2010 14:53 GMT  ·  By

After releasing Exchange Server 2010 in November 2009, Microsoft has moved onward with the evolution of the product, building the first major upgrade. Today, April 7th, the Redmond company shared the first details related to Exchange Server 2010, which is planned for launch by the end of this year. Michael Atalla, Microsoft's group product manager for Exchange, underlines that the feedback related to the latest iteration of Exchange has been positive, and that improvements will be delivered later this year.

“SP1 will include fixes and tweaks in areas you've helped us identify, including a roll-up of the roll-ups we've released to date. I also wanted to flag some of the feature enhancements we're excited to bring to you with SP1 including: archiving and discovery enhancements, Outlook Web App (OWA) improvements, mobile user and management improvements, and some highly sought after additional UI for management tasks. This is not an all-inclusive list, so stay tuned for the detailed list coming soon,” Atalla promises.

According to the Redmond company, customers already running Exchange 2010 will only have to wait a couple of months before they will be able to get their hands on the service pack. A Beta development milestone of Exchange Server 2010 SP1 is planned for release in June 2010 at TechEd North America. Since TechEd North America is planned between June 7 and 10, customers should get their testing environments ready, and plan for the upcoming SP1 release. Up to this point in time, Microsoft has not offered a specific delivery deadline for Exchange Server 2010 SP1.

The four areas of evolution for Exchange 2010 SP1 noted above by Atalla bring to the table a variety of enhancements themselves. As far as the new Management UI is concerned, SP1 will kick up a notch both the Exchange Management Console (EMC) and Exchange Control Panel (ECP), in order to allow customers to perform additional tasks without turning to PowerShell. Atalla has offered a list of management tasks that will be streamlined in EMC and ECP.

In terms of mobility, “In SP1, mobile users will be treated with tether-free IRM support in EAS, enabling you to send and receive IRM-protected mail without having previously connected your device to Windows Mobile Device Center to provision IRM,” Atalla adds. “Updated EAS capabilities also enable support for send-as, support for notifying the user if their device has been placed on block or quarantine by their admin, full implementation of conversation view including the ability to sync only unique parts of messages. Also, for those users who need help setting up their mobile device to access mail via POP/IMAP/SMTP, we've added information in OWA to provide them the server names for these services.”

Following the integration of SP1, customers running Office Outlook 2007 will be able to access their Personal Archive, Microsoft promises. However, this is just one of the many Archiving and Discovery enhancements planned by the Redmond company. Based on customer feedback, Exchange 2010 has been tweaked to make it possible for a user's Personal Archive to be provisioned to a mailbox database that is not their primary mailbox. This move will allow organizations to better handle Personal Archives for content that is less accessed in tiered storage scenarios.

Exchange admins will be able to delegate access to a user’s Personal Archive after the delivery of SP1, Atalla reveals, with users having the option to import historical e-mail data from .PSTs files, directly into Exchange.

“To help streamline the implementation of retention policies, SP1 updates the Exchange Management Console with new tools to create Retention Policy Tags, so you can automate the deletion and archiving of e-mail and other Exchange items. New optional Retention Policy Tags give you even more flexibility in defining your organizations retention management strategy. Lastly, we've made several improvements to the Multi-Mailbox Search features, which can be used to conduct e-Discovery of e-mail for legal, regulatory or other reasons,” Atalla says.

Exchange 2010 SP1 will also take Outlook Web App to the next level, with additions such as pre-fetching message content, which boosts the solution’s performance. At the same time, a range of tasks, including delete, mark as read, and categorize operations will be running asynchronously, also improving speed and delivering the sentiment that they are performed instantaneously. Performance work has also been focused on ensuring that complex operations will not take a heavy toll on the OWA experience, by provoking web UI hang-ups.

“In RTM, we delivered Information Rights Management (IRM) capabilities in OWA, allowing you to read and compose IRM-protected messages just like you've been able to do with Outlook in the past. In SP1, you'll be able to add Web-Ready Document Viewing of IRM-protected documents as well and you'll be able to do so in Safari on a Mac as well as in Firefox or IE on a PC,” Atalla explains. “Finally, for those of you who have been dying to change the look and feel of OWA, we're bringing OWA themes back; adding several OWA themes so you can match the OWA experience to your particular style. Oh yeah, and yes, the reading pane can be placed on the bottom or the right side.”