RSSMicrosoft's Top 3 advances in Exchange Server 2010
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 9, 2009, 6:16 PM
The biggest change to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 was supposed to have been the introduction of something called Unified Communications -- the introduction of a singular console for the handling of all forms of digital communication, wrapping voice mail, instant messaging, and e-mail into a single delivery system. History may yet vindicate UC as the product's singular achievement.
But in the near term, administrators credit Exchange more for what it gives them than the world at large. In that light, the inclusion of PowerShell as not only the underlying language of the system but as its engine as well, changed everything for the admin. It may very well be why the product has surged to a two-thirds market share, by some estimates, over once formidable competition such as Lotus Notes.
So learning a lesson from history, the message from Microsoft with regard to Exchange Server 2010, which went on sale this morning, is about new levels of control. The idea that e-mail, or any kind of communication, once sent unto the vast Internet is out of the sender's hands -- like a paper sailboat launched from a river pier -- is what the Exchange team has been working to combat. During a beta program which Microsoft says involved dozens of universities, signing up some ten million participants worldwide, the company has completed development of a browser-based endpoint for ES 2010-delivered e-mail that is not only more manageable than Outlook 2007, but that has beaten Outlook 2010 -- the product it's supposed to be derived from -- to market by perhaps eight months.
What that means is, hopefully for a short time only, there will be a functionality gap between what the new Outlook Web App -- hosted by ES 2010 -- can deliver compared to what Outlook 2007 provides. If Julia White, Microsoft's marketing director for Exchange, has anything to say about it, that gap will be shorter rather than longer, but it's not unnoticed.
![Microsoft Outlook Web App previews the textual contents of a voice mail. [Courtesy Microsoft Corp.]](http://images.betanews.com/media/4044.jpg "Microsoft Outlook Web App previews the textual contents of a voice mail. [Courtesy Microsoft Corp.]")
Microsoft Outlook Web App previews the textual contents of a voice mail. [Courtesy Microsoft Corp.]
White spoke with Betanews this afternoon from Berlin, where she had just completed a TechEd Europe demonstration along with Corporate Vice President Stephen Elop. "Obviously Outlook Web Apps comes with Exchange, so they can use that today; when Outlook 2010 comes out, they can use that," said White, "and we are absolutely planning support for Outlook 2007 in the roadmap here. So it's on the agenda, and we will actually be getting to it."
Much of what Exchange 2010 will deliver absolutely depends on this upgrade to Outlook 2007, as you'll see. We asked White for her take on what she would consider the top three enhancements to administrator functionality in ES 2010.
#3: Transport Protection Rules
Number three on this list is the Transport Protection Rules system, which we described earlier today. It enables the administrator to designate the extent to which the recipient of a message can utilize its contents, based upon rules that enable Exchange to analyze the content itself. "In the demo this morning, I set a Transport Protection Rule based on a keyword. But actually another aspect of that is, those rules can be set based on the sender, the recipient, or even contents of an attachment," White told Betanews.
"Any of those things can be triggered; and having the ability to centrally decide what gets encrypted and what doesn't, is a really powerful tool. With end users, it's hard for them to keep up with corporate policy, pay attention to it, or know about it. So oftentimes it's unintended, versus intended, when information isn't protected. Having that essentially managed brings peace of mind, for the users as well as the IT pros."
The ability to analyze an attachment takes place on a granular level, White told us. If a PowerPoint presentation, for example, were to contain the words "Microsoft Confidential," that fact alone would trigger a rule that automatically encrypts the message outgoing, and that restricts the recipient from being able to pass it on.
#2: Role-Based Access Control
One of the least loved features of Exchange, or anything Microsoft has ever done, disappears in ES 2010: The Access Control List is a Registry-based system for designating which identified and authenticated user had permissions to control specific objects. It has often been a ridiculous concept that starts one off with the assumption that everyone has rights to everything, and that ACLs provide the exceptions.
Exchange Server 2010 replaces this entirely with a concept that is much more rooted in Active Directory. Now, the administrator starts off in a universe where nothing is allowed until groups of users are added into the pool of permissions. Those groups that are added in are called management role groups, with the concept being that a predefined set of roles exist (a concept made popular by Windows Server 2008), and that groups of users or individual users are delegated those roles.
This morning, Julia White demonstrated how Role-Based Access Control enabled an otherwise unprivileged user to search for e-mails through multiple mailboxes on the company's behalf (in this case, Microsoft's usual fictitious firm, Contoso). Her system was delegated a role that let her perform the search, without having to delegate other responsibilities and privileges of a much higher administrative order. "A compliance officer might get that level of capability," White explained to us, "but a help desk might have the rights to increase mail box quota size. Maybe HR would be given the ability to update contact information on behalf of employees. Extending all the way down to end users, even that same roles-based administration capability -- end users can now create and manage their own distribution groups within Exchange. That no longer requires a call to the IT pro...usually that's a lot of overhead."
Next: The best thing ever to happen to old e-mail...
I have a hard time buying into the "big, slow" disks as the disk of choice. At least with our environment, virtualization has been the cost cutter. To really have a high performance / highly available virtualized environment, you need - fast and - centralized storage. Big, slow disks aren't going to do that, and I can't see buying these devices as cost effective or administratively beneficial. SAN costs are coming down too, so as far as being "cost prohibitive" - it's all in where your business chooses to save.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not down playing the cost of storage. It's always a cost measured monetarily and as overhead.
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|Honestly, the main reason we're upgrading is that we currently have a 5+ year old mail server running Windows 2000 Server and Exchange 2003 on it. For some reason, the admins prior to me and my boss decided it would be nice to put the Exchange Server, storage, and domain controller all on the same server. Somehow it's lasted this long, and it has quite a few quirks, but we're running out of hard drive space plus the database is approaching the 75GB limit that Exchange 2003 Standard has.
Needless to say, once we get our new server the difference should be night and day. The integrated archiving is going to be a huge help--currently we "make the rounds" forcing attorneys and secretaries with the largest mailboxes to manually archive their email to a .pst file on our data server using mapped drives. Yup, I'm looking forward to the new server.
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|"currently we "make the rounds" forcing attorneys and secretaries with the largest mailboxes to manually archive their email to a .pst file on our data server using mapped drives.
Same here. It's been a major source of heartburn for several years now... Hopefully soon to be remedied.
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|Little reason to run Exchange in-house these days. With caching and encryption where it is, hosted Exchange is where it's at.
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|You can't make a blanket statment. It shouldbe based on a business case. At my company we have nearly 10,000 users. Using hosted exchange would cost nearly double to do it inhouse. The scalability of Exchne 2007/2010 make it so that you cram thousands of users on a single 64-bit machine. Plus, the stability of Exchange has gotten to the point where it is near mainframe like. It just rolls.
It pains me to say those things because I came from a Domino background and Exchane was my enemy.
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|I often wonder why people think that. I have a Mid Size company that I have a Exchange 2003 box with Failover if needed on premises and in 6 years rarily ever have a problem with it. It cost me so much less doing it myself than farming it out.
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|"You can't make a blanket statment."
Heh... Like telling a fish not to swim, frankwick. MJ loves his generalized "opinion as fact" statements.
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|I imagine people that go with in-house exchange just want to keep their high salaried Exchange jobs?
I did preface it with "little reason." Even in the examples above they obviously put their fish in one basket and a case could still be made for hosted. Email is such a commodity, there is *little reason* to run it in house versus hosted, because management of Exchange is expensive, and the majority of the cost. Why not put that elsewhere with people that know what they are doing?
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|Little reason to post comments like this.
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|Also, when I was an Exchange admin, the reason that we had users archive their email was because we didn't want to have a 200GB+ EDB file sitting that if we needed to do a full restore would take hours to transfer.
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|"even in a JBoss configuration" - should that be JBOD?
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|I have never been using MS Exchange. I am wondering if it is comparable with such Open Source Linux tools as Evolution.
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|Exchange is a server application. Evolution, at least according to its project page, is a client.
They are not comparable, though, in my experience at least, Evolution until very recent versions suffered from numerous stability issues.
Regards,
Ruemere
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|Evolution, while (kind of) nice in appearance still cannot hold a candle to Outlook. It still cannot sync with an Exchange 2007 server and even when dealing with an Exchange 2003 server, it has issues.
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|The cost savings is real. We were one of the beta users of Exchange Server 2010 and having recently deployed Exchange 2007 within the year we found to deploy Exchange Server 2010 it would cost us between 65-70% less just in storage alone compared to what we would need to purchase for Exchange Server 2007 today. More impressive is that even with this cost savings it got us a 4th copy of our data, which today we only have 3 of.
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|How does 2010 save you storage costs over 2007?
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|70% less I/O and no need for expensive SAN storage. Or, for that matter, RAID.
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|58sniper -- do you have a reference link to documentation or an article indicating such. This is compelling information in my case since i plan on doing an exchange 2007 migration. Are you talking all local storage for exch2010 ? Looking forward to seeing more info..
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|http://msexchangeteam.com/ read up hboogz...
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|I'll have to use my google-fu since that was pretty useless. I know msexchange team, I really was looking for an article indicating that there is a need for a SAN, RAID and documenting 70 % less I/O.
Let me guess what your next link will be, www.microsoft.com ?
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|Look on msexchangeteam.com - that's the official blog of the Exchange product team. Plenty of info there on why SAN is not needed, and the reduced I/O.
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|Scott, is there a reason why most (if not all) images that are included with articles are not able to be enlarged?
That would certainly make the OWA image above, as well as the charts for the CRPI articles, more easily readable.
I seem to recall being able to do that in the not-too-distant past... and I don't think it's a browser issue.
Just a suggestion. Good article, by the way. I'm definitely looking forward to exploring all that Exchange Server 2010 has to offer soon.
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