Hi fellow IT-Pro's,

The last couple of days I was attending Interact 2009 and totally loved it. The level of interaction was great, in fact we got no powerpoint presentation at all !! ;-). Have a look at Eileen’s blog posting on Interact 2009 http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2009/04/15/interact-2009-and-exchange-2010.aspx

While we were attending we also got the green light to start blogging about the new features available in Exchange 2010 and some of the things that will no longer be with us (such as SCC).

This posting is meant to be a first high level overview of what most likely is already blogged intensively over the internet at the moment...

1) Forget about CCR and SCR and think Database Availability Group... DAG is the new way of doing HA and DR. Deploying DAG is easier than ever as it will deploy the necessary Windows Clustering components for you. Also you can now get up to 16 replica’s of your mailbox database and the failover granularity is now on Database level instead of Server level. Have a look here for more information http://www.exchange-genie.com/2009/04/database-availability-group-dag-exchange-2010/

2) Considering the investments done in DAG with the reduced storage requirements (DAS, Raid less Storage so JBOD’s) and replication support they removed support for Single Copy Clusters (SCC) which typically depended on implementing a storage level replication to provide for site resilient solutions.

3) No more storage groups, it’s all Database now..

4) Exchange Clusters support other roles now, so you run Hub Transport and Client Access server on the cluster.. This will get you that consolidation story without sacrificing redundancy.

5) Exchange Unified Messaging supports up to 30 languages now for OVA, so it’s no longer only English but you take talk in Dutch or French as well to the server.

6) Exchange Unified Messaging now also provide speech to text capabilities...When you look at your voicemail once received in Outlook  you get a summary of it in “text”.. which makes your voicemail searchable

7) Exchange 2010 now provides an archiving solution where you can move your PST into the mailbox, set retention policies  and allow for cross-mailbox searches using a web-interface.

8) Thanks to some more improvements in the ESE engine you get an additional 50% IO reduction in Exchange 2010, combined with the storage reductions from Exchange 2007 (which was 70%) you get a whopping 85% IO reduction from Exchange 2003 (if my calculation are right ;-)

9) Outlook Web Access now fully supports Firefox and Safari in Premium mode which is just great as I use OWA and Firefox very regularly…

10) Outlook Web Access provides conversation views which will condenses your emails by threads.

11) Mailtips is also a great new feature which provides instant feedback on the email you’re about the send before you submitted it. Imagine you’re sending an email to someone who is OOF, instead of submitting the email you get notified upfront that the user is not in the office. Other tips are when you are sending to a Distribution list and it contains an external contact or the user’s mailbox receive quota has been reached etc..

12) Windows Server 2003 is not supported for Exchange 2010, so start looking at providing a foundation for your Windows 2008 servers

13) Powershell V2 support with remoting capabilities.

14) Exchange now provides Role Based Access Control (RBAC) which allows you to provide for VERY granular control of what your operational teams are allowed to execute

15) Users can now manage some things themselves through a Control Panel in Outlook Web Access. For example creating distribution lists, managing members of it etc..

And there is much more like integration with the MSOnline allowing you to host some mailboxes on premise and some in the “cloud”.

If you have any feedback question or see issues please let us know in the forums.

Let's learn and continue to interact !!!

Greetings,
Tonino Bruno