Exchange 2010 SP1 is now available!

Very cool improvements for Exchange 2010 in the SP1 release
Read about the enhancements here:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/04/07/454533.aspx

You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=50b32685-4356-49cc-8b37-d9c9d4ea3f5b&displaylang=en

Rocky Mountain Tech Tri-Fecta Exchange 2010 Presentation

Today was the Rocky Mountain Tech Tri-Fecta at the Auraria campus in downtown Denver. I did a presentation on Exchange 2010, I thought it went well. I only had eight attendees in my session, would have like more but felt everyone attending took some good information from the presentation. I want to thank those eight people for attending, hopefully you had fun and learned something, and please do not hesitate to contact me with any followup questions or need additional information at sean dot mcneill at statera dot com. If you would not mind I would also appreciate you email me any feedback you had about the session, both content and my presentation, thanks.
I promised the attendees I would post the slide deck here, but when I said that I was unaware that blogger does not allow any file upload. I have already sent the presentation to Statera.com's webmaster to get it posted there and once completed I will post the link on this blog.

Update: Got my presentation uploaded and it can be accessed here, http://www.statera.com/Documents/MicrosoftExchange2010Overview.pptx

Outlook 2003 and Exchange 2010

At my current client I am doing an Exchange 2010 deployment into an environment that has Office/Outlook 2003 as the primary client. Ran into a few gotchas with this scenario.

1. Outlook 2003 with the default settings will not connect to a mailbox on Exchange 2010. This is because by default Exchange 2010 requires RPC Encryption between the client (Outlook) and the Exchange Server. Outlook 2003 does not have this enabled by default, Outlook 2007/2010 do have this enabled by default. You must choose the "more Settings" button when configuring an account in Outlook 2003 and select the Security tab to enable Encryption between Outlook and the Exchange Server. This can also be done via a GPO setting with Outlook 2003 provided you install the Office/Outlook 2003 ADM files and also modify the OutLK11.adm file to include the below Policy:
POLICY "Enable RPC Encryption"
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\RPC
PART "Check to turn setting on; uncheck to turn setting off" CHECKBOX
VALUENAME EnableRPCEncrption
VALUEON Numeric 1
VALUEOFF Numeric 0
END PART
END POLICY

2. Outlook 2003 in Online mode is slow to update deleted items sometimes resulting in unknown error messages. This is because Exchange 2010 does not issue UDP notifications to Outlook 2003, it defaults to a 60 second polling cycle. This behavior is somewhat corrected with Update Rollup 1 for Exchange 2010 and a RegHack on the Exchange 2010 CAS servers. For a description of Update Rollup 1 and a download location go here, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;976573
The RegHack is located and explained here, http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;2009942&sd=rss&spid=13965
I recommend setting ParametersSystem to 10000, as this is the minimum time (10 seconds) that Outlook 2003 will pole for updates from Exchange. It is to be noted that this change will result in an additional load on the Exchange 2010 server hosting the CAS role, plan accordingly.

The best way to alleviate this problem is to upgrade the Outlook clients to 2007 (and 2010 when available) versions. The fix for #2 above with only improve the problem, not completely solve it.

As always if you need any help with an Exchange deployment please do not hesitate to contact me directly at Sean dot McNeill at Statera dot com.

Exchange 2010 versus 2007

As a senior consultant with Statera I go out on sales calls and work with clients wanting to upgrade their messaging environment. Lately I have had to explain the difference and reasoning about going to Exchange 2010. Several prospective or current clients want to know why they should go to a relatively new technology in Exchange 2010 instead of Exchange 2007. I usually give the same speech and figured I would give the high points in this post:

1. DAG's (Database Availability Groups) this is probably the most compelling reason to go directly to 2010. DAG's offer the most straight forward and easiest way to invoke both High Availability and Disaster Recovery. DAG's combine and enhance the various replication options from Exchange 2007 (LCR, CCR, SCC and SCR) into a standard, easily administrated solution. Exchange 2010 removes Storage Groups from the Exchange vernacular and puts the Database as the main storage hierarchy. Another benefit of DAGs versus Mailbox clustering in Exchange 2oo7 is that now instead of a active passive scenario, you can now have an active active scenario with each node having active databases and cop0y databases; this allows for better utilization of server hardware.
2. Server reduction: Exchange 2010 allows an organization to placed the HUB and CAS roles on a server that is participating on a Mailbox DAG. Previously in Exchange 2007 if you had a clustered Mailbox server you could not place any other roles on the clustered servers. Exchange 2010 can reduce a simple high availability design for an organization from four server to two. In Exchange 2007 you would need to have two dedicated servers for a mailbox cluster and then another two servers to host the HUB and CAS roles. In Exchange 2010 you can have the same redundancy with only two servers, each one hosting the Mailbox, HUB and CAS roles.

There are also other benefits of Exchange 2010 is the reduction is IOPS for the databases has been calculated as much as 70% compared to Exchange 2007. Since the path to go from Exchange 200X to Exchange 2010 is the same, a company looking to move either to Exchange 2007 or 2010 is a big decision. If the company decides to go with 2007 a complete migration will require another complete migration in the future to migrate to 2010. My recommendation is to forgo the next migration and go directly to 2010. While 2010 supports installation on Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2007 does not. These two factors highlight that going directly to Exchange 2010 and Server 20087 R2 will result in a company being in a supported state from Microsoft for a longer duration than going with Exchange 2007 on Server 2008.

I do understand that some companies still are hesitant to run on the "Bleeding Edge" of technology. My answer to this is that Exchange 2010 is more of an R2 version of Exchange 2007 than a complete redesign of the Exchange platform as Exchange 2007 was compared to Exchange 2000/2003.

If you are contemplating this move please take the above information into effect and please do not hesitate to contact me at Sean dot McNeill at Statera dot com for more information.

Exchange 2010 Info

Couple good announcements about Exchange 2010:
Blackberry Enterprise Server support for Exchange 2010,
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/12/09/453486.aspx

Exchange 2010 Rollup 1 has been released,
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/12/09/453485.aspx

Exchange 2010 goes RTM!

It is official, hot off the presses Exchange 2010 goes live!
see the full announcement here from the MS Exchange Team: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/11/09/453096.aspx

Exchange 2010 Code Complete

The MSExchange Team guys are reporting that the Exchange 2010 Code is complete and is on schedule for RTM in early November.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx

Exchange 2010

I attended the Microsoft Launch for Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 here in Denver this week. My company http://www.statera.com/ was actually a sponsor and I worked our table for awhile. In the afternoon I was able to attend a couple sessions on Exchange 2010 with Harold Wong.
The first session was about Exchange 2010 high availability. One of the biggest changes in 2010 is the removal of Storage Groups, now you only deal with Databases. And with databases you can create Database Access Groups (DAG). A DAG consists of Databases and Mailbox servers for replication. Was is improved from Exchange 2007 is the fact that a database can be easily replicated to up to 16 mailbox servers. Also databases can be staggered to be active on multiple mailbox servers. You can have database one active on mailbox server 1, database 2 active on mailbox server 2 with each mailbox server having a replicated copy of the non-active database. This basically allows you to have an Active-Active cluster. Allowing an organization to utilize all mailbox servers for active user connections.
Another huge feature is the fact that you can now have the HUB and CAS role on a mailbox server that is participating in a DAG. in Exchange 2007 if you clustered the mailbox role you could not place any other roles on that server. Now a small to medium size company can have complete redundancy with only two servers running MB, HUB and CAS roles.

The Second session was about Archiving in Exchange 2010. Microsoft now offers Archiving naively in 2010, but it is a light implementation. The problem I see, as Harold pointed out, is the fact that the archive mailbox for a user's mailbox is located in the same database as the user mailbox. This configuration really kinda defeats one of the primary reasons to archive, move the archived mail off the primary mailbox server and storage and move to secondary storage. Harold stated that Microsoft is working on a fix to allow the archived mailbox to be setup on another database, this would probably be in a service pack for 2010. Another missing piece is a tool to automatically move messages and items from local PST files to the archive location. With the release a user would need to manually do this step.

More to come on Exchange 2010!

Exchange 2010 Call Answering Rules

The guys over at the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog have a great entry talking about new functionality in Unified Messaging for Exchange 2010, Call Answering Rules. Check it out here, http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/06/22/451667.aspx