Paul's Down-Home Page

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!

I was really excited to see a huge new set of guides for configuring various PBX systems to work with Exchange UM. However, once I started looking at the configuration notes, I found that they’re still pretty basic (and in some cases empty). However, it’s encouraging that Microsoft is planning to work with its partners to get better configuration guidance out there.

Sometimes you actually want one account to have access to all the mailboxes in a database, on the store, or in an organization. In Exchange 5.5, you could just use the service account; in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003, you have to resort to various kinds of tomfoolery. In Exchange 2003, the Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins security groups (and the built-in Administrator account) actually have an explicit deny ACE that prevents you from using these accounts to gain service access. What about Exchange 2007?

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Today I powered up and configured the Intel/Eicon PIMG gateway, which links the Mitel 3300 ICP with Exchange 2007. However, this has exposed a major structural problem.

My current office is divided into two halves: in one half, I have a shelving unit that has the 3300, all of my servers, and some related stuff-n-junk (like a KVM switch, an old Dell keyboard, and an ancient 17″ CRT). In the other half, I have my main network switch, my phone panel, and my work machines. Both sides are already networked together, but:

• the 3300 can provide Power over Ethernet (PoE) to the Mitel phones, without which they won’t work. (Mitel makes a desk sled that powers the phones but I don’t have any of those).
• I need to run two analog lines from the phone panel to the 3300, then back again; the ASU in the 3300 will let it answer the analog extensions and do call transfer, forwarding, etc. between the digital and analog lines– very cool
• I really need a phone on my desk
• The 3300 is way noisier than any other piece of equipment in my office

Thus I get to choose between “lots of cables on the floor” or “unrelenting fan noise”. Not a great choice. In a couple of weeks when my upstairs office is finished, the question will be moot, so for now I’m going to leave the 3300 where it is and run one long net cable to it so I can power a desk phone. Analog line integration will have to wait for now.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Mitel, Unified Messaging

Yes, it’s that time of year again! Even though we haven’t even started the fall 2006 Exchange Connections show, I’m already looking for session proposals for the spring 2007 show (1-4 April in Orlando– finally, a time that coincides with my kids’ spring school break!).

Our goal is to have about 50% coverage of Exchange 2007, Office 2007, and SharePoint 2007 and about 50% on Exchange 2003, Office 2003, and related topics like Live Communications Server, deployment, and security. We’re interested in sessions that cover all aspects of Microsoft’s communications and collaboration stack: security, development, management, operations, migration, and integration.

If you’re interested in speaking, please send me 3-5 short abstracts and a brief speaker bio. I need these by EOD Wednesday, November 1. (Thanks to Nino for correcting the date!)

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, ExchConn

Great post at the Exchange team blog covering how server and recipient filtering work in the new Exchange Management Console. Don’t confuse this kind of filtering with recipient filtering in the anti-spam stack; same name but two entirely different things.

I’m a satisfied GoDaddy customer, but I’m a little unhappy with them at the moment. This morning, I tried to buy one of their 6-in-1 SSL certificates. Why? I wanted to be able to use one cert for autodiscover.robichaux.net and mail.robichaux.net. I figured the 6-in-1 would let me do so because the wording on the 6-in-1 order page says you can register up to six matching domains. I figured that they’d allow multiple subject alternative names, which is what I wanted. What they actually mean, though, is that you can register the same domain in up to six different TLDs… not quite the same thing. I really don’t want to buy a wildcard cert; I think I’ll probably just stick with the self-signed cert if I can’t buy an inexpensive cert with multiple subject alternative names.

You may have been wondering how Microsoft’s going to package (or, to verb a useful noun, SKU) SharePoint 2007. The official SharePoint team blog has the answer, sort of. The article links to a nifty spreadsheet that covers the primary differences between SharePoint 2003, SharePoint Server 2007, and the various SKUs of SharePoint 2007. Worth reading if you follow SharePoint as a collaboration technology.

Over at his InfoWorld blog, Dave Rosenberg makes an awfully interesting assertion: Zimbra’s well on the way to becoming a billion-dollar business. However, he uses some way faulty math to get there: he takes at face value Zimbra’s claim of 4 million paid mailboxes, then multiplies it by the $25/mailbox MSRP to get an annualized revenue of $100 million. From there, hey, it’s only an order of magnitude to get to $1 billion, right?

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