Tech Preview of Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Available Today

It's a phrase that's starting to become a part of the typical Microsoft user vernacular: "Just wait until Service Pack 1." When Exchange Server 2007 was released last year, there were a number of key feature implementations that had to wait until a future release. That wait may be nearing its end, as Microsoft is giving Exchange admins a taste of at least some of what they've been asking for since last year, with the pending release of a technology preview of Exchange Server SP1.

While installing a preview release of a full-scale enterprise communications environment sounds like playing with fire, many admins already have virtual network environments already configured from having already tested ES 2007's initial release. There, admins may have set up virtual users in a non-existent domain (for instance, with the non-Internet-translatable ".local" top-level domain), and DNS within a virtual server to resolve those addresses.

It's in one of these semi-existent pilot program environments where admins can test the viability of long-promised features like S/MIME encryption for Outlook Web Access (OWA) clients. ES 2007 was the first edition that could be set up to provide users with an Outlook-like e-mail and communications environment from within any Web browser, rather than through the Office Outlook client. This way, users' communications panels become truly portable, accessible from almost any terminal.

Of course, you can already imagine the problems that emerge from a fully portable environment, including leaving behind traces of sent messages at hotel lobby Internet terminals. This is one reason why full S/MIME encryption at the Web Access client level was so tremendously important - and why some admins chose to "Just wait until Service Pack 1" to even try implementing OWA in the first place.

OWA users will also finally be able to enjoy public folders, which was a feature that was supposed to work in the initial release and never did.

And at long last, ES 2007 users will now be able to create their own personal distribution lists. This is actually a feature of Outlook, and has been for some time - except Exchange never really supported it. The reason why is quite esoteric; suffice it to say that Microsoft finally found a way around modifying users' personal "stores."

Now, any client - including an OWA user - can create her own list of multiple addresses to whom bursts of e-mail may be sent, without having to instruct the admin to do this for her and then delegate ownership of that shared distribution list to the user. (Because a shared distribution list was essentially a system distribution list with the security knocked out, the old way of creating a DL was actually a security risk.)

So yes, users can now delegate multiple recipients of e-mails within an enterprise by yourself, without contacting the admin first and without alerting Homeland Security.

In the Really Cool Ideas department, SP1 will enable a data center feature called standby continuous replication, which enables clusters to continually feed backup data to a failover in case of an eventual emergency.

As the Exchange Team blog describes it, "With Exchange 2007, we introduced Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) for replication of data between 2 servers within a cluster. With SCR, data can be replicated on a per-storage group basis to standby servers or clusters. The SCR target, whether a single mailbox server or a cluster, can be placed inside the primary datacenter or in a remote location, ready to be manually activated if the primary server or datacenter fails."

There's also some additions to support for Unified Communications that could make the whole process somewhat more unified. For instance, if a UC user sets up his phone to forward calls to another UC phone, and no one picks up that phone, the caller will be told that the forwarded destination - not the forwarding destination - is handling the message, and will receive the message later. That's actually what happens anyway, but the caller had been told otherwise.

Also, voice mails can now be retrieved through a single-click alert box. BetaNews was actually in the audience during a UC demo when an audience member made that suggestion, and it was amazing to watch the faces of developers as they realized, as if in slow motion, "Why didn't we think of that earlier?"

At the time of this post, the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 download link had not yet been activated, though Microsoft has informed us it should be online sometime today.