14 DAY TRIAL // In addition to the Service Pack 2 for the Office 2007 System, Microsoft is also cooking the second service pack for Exchange Server 2007. According to the Redmond company, Exchange 2007 SP2 is expected to drop in the second half of this year, more precisely in the third quarter of 2009. As is the case with all Microsoft service pack releases, SP2 will be offered free of charge to all customers that have acquired Exchange Server 2007. In this context, Exchange Server 2007 SP2 will come at a time when Microsoft is offering the public Beta of Exchange 2010.
“Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is the industry's leading server for e-mail, calendaring and unified messaging. Exchange Server 2007 is the foundation for a dynamic and holistic unified communications experience, and has been designed to meet the challenges and address the messaging needs of today's businesses. Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) enables customers to increase their operational efficiency and it sets the foundation for the transition to Exchange Server 2010, which is expected to be available in the second half of 2009,” revealed a member of the Exchange team.
Microsoft indicated that a number of areas across its email server would be enhanced. Customers currently running Exchange Server 2007 will be able to benefit, following the integration of SP2 from: enhanced auditing, Exchange volume snapshot backup functionality, Dynamic Active Directory schema update and validation, public folder quota management, centralized organizational settings, named properties cmdlets, and new user interface for managing diagnostic logging.
With SP2, Exchange Server 2007 administrators will be able to take a closer look at the activities on their servers with the new and improved auditing capabilities. Microsoft has even bridged Exchange Server 2007 with Windows Server 2008 through a plug-in that will enable backups to be performed from the server platform. On top of this, SP2 for Exchange Server 2007 will catalyze the addition of dynamic updates to the AD schema.
“SP2 enables a consistent way to manage quotas by improving the current PowerShell cmdlets to perform quota management tasks,” the Exchange team representative added. “SP2 introduces new PowerShell options that enable centralized management of many of the Exchange organization settings. SP2 enables Exchange administrators to monitor their named property usage per database. SP2 enables Exchange administrators to easily configure and manage diagnostic logging from within the Exchange Management Console.”