What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, except when I blog it!!
Right now, I’m in the main ballroom at the Mandalay Bay, waiting for David Lemson to start his Exchange session keynote.
8:09: Talk about each of the areas where we decided to put features into the release. 4 more sessions this afternoon covering mobility, admin, transport, and how to get started on deployment. Show of hands: who’s installed a beta build of Exchange 2007? About 25% of the audience. Some of the things shown today aren’t in the beta.
8:19: core focus in Exchange 2007 in 3 areas: built-in protection, anywhere access, operational efficiency. Familiar slide, as it’s been the leadoff for most tof the MS presentations since Jan 06. Comparisons between Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 in various areas (HA, etc). DAS instead of shared storage for clustering brings huge savings in many environments.Nice change: 14-day deleted item retention out of the box. Restore any database to any server via recovery storage group because all servers are in same admin group.
8:22: move-user-configurationOnly cmdlet: rehome a user’s mailbox very rapidly. Nice feature; I didn’t know about it. New best practice: do weekly full backups from the passive cluster node, coupled with CCR. No more daily backup requirement. “Big burrito”: nifty chart: same hardware and user load. 0.6 IOPS Exchange 2003 4GB, 0.32 IOPS Exchange 2007 4 GB, 0.13 IOPS Exchange 2007 8 GB: 78% fewer IOPS/user. (Ed: this is pretty sweet! 4GB of RAM is much cheaper than disk spindles.)
8:28: new compliance approach: create managed folders, then users move mail they need to keep into managed folders. Delete everything else! (Ed: this puts the onus of figuring out what to keep on users– many of whom will hate this.)
8:32: automatic Kerberos and TLS for all internal server-to-server mail, with automatic/opportunistic TLS (ed: finally!) “Domain Authenticated” e-mail uses mutual TLS, but no real details on how this works. Pre-licensing for RMS prefetches RMS use license on the hub transport server– useful feature for travelers.
8:40: demo of Outlook safe sender aggregation.
8:45: slight error in Forefront slide: he says you can have 7 concurrent AV engines, but you can only run 5 at a time (out of the 9 available). Recovery PIN for mobile devices lets you unlock a mobile device by getting a recovery PIN from within OWA– new post-TechEd feature. Exchange UM demo, which went better than any of mine ever did thanks to a better audio setup (and a better presenter :)) Screenshots of OWA, mobile device, and Outlook search: same search experience, driven by new, faster content indexer.
8:55: calendaring improvements, including the availability service. Eliminates calendar latency by allowing auto-tentative-acceptance of meetings. (Ed: this is one of my favorite features so I’m glad to see it getting some play!) Built-in resource booking. Scheduled OOF with rich text. Set OOF from a Windows Mobile device. Internal vs external OOF, with separate messages. “LinkAccess” provides admin-controlled access to UNC paths and SharePoint sites throuh OWA or from mobile device.
9:01: “open as web page” document transcoding: doc attachments converted on the fly to HTML (with pretty good fidelity). Better embedding of OWA in SharePoint. Now we’re down to the feature grab bag: improved ExBPA,
Big finish: RTM in December. 80K mailboxes in production at MS, all inbound mail filtered by Exchange 2007. December or bust!
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