14 DAY TRIAL // The first Service Pack for Exchange Server 2007 will drop any time now. As early as February 23, 2007, Terry Myerson, General Manager, Microsoft Exchange Server announced that the Beta for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 will be made available in April. While not specifying the actual date of the release, Microsoft has kept its options opened, but it seems that the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta will shortly be available for download via TechNet.
Microsoft has published the release notes for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Beta since last week. According to the Microsoft Exchange team, the fundamental role of Service Pack 1 will be to pug in the feature holes that the Redmond Company did not manage to fill by the RTM date. Personal distribution lists, S/MIME, rules, monthly calendar view, deleted item recovery and public folder access are among the features that will be added with SP1.
As such, Outlook Web Access users will be enabled to access, post, post a reply to, and search public folders. Items that have been removed from the Deleted Items folder can be now recovered by Outlook Web Access clients. Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta will introduce the file format converter for the 2007 Microsoft office System.
"Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) is the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 1 feature that enables Outlook Web Access users to read and compose messages that are digitally signed or encrypted," reads a fragment of the release notes for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 Beta.
Additionally, SP1 delivers improved Unified Messaging features. In this regard, users have to be running Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Beta 1 on all Unified Messaging servers together with Office Communications Server 2007 (Beta 3 Refresh).