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First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."
The invoice for this baby is pretty small compared to your normal MS Exchange Server, it's only 1. But that's not in dollars, that's in first born children. So I'm going to throw out a few strategies for coping with this.
So, like pretending you're a college student, starving African or university staff to get cheap editions of Exchange 2007, there are ways to acquired 2010 at a relatively low cost and I hope this helps you cope with the extreme cost of owning Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for your enterprise business.
... but that's just the unspoken rule.
Sure the costs don't stop there, you need to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 to use it and there are a few more things you'll need to upgrade if you want to keep the same functionality you have now
My work here is dung.
What database engine is it using, and can we access it via SQL?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.'
Both of these options seem like terrible ideas to me if you care at all about your data.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I kind of like it when my mail server is, you know, just a mail server. Call me a nut but SMTP + IMAP do everything I need.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Oh nevermind :-)
No mention of junk mail in the article. I'm still waiting for Bill to deliver on his promise of a 'spam free world.'
His first point is you can use it with FF and Safari. Nice, but not a really big deal to most admins.
Then his second favorite feature is that you can do database level real time replication - you know, without having to know about all that REALLY hard stuff, like RAID, or what this SCSI crap is, or backups.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
But does it have Exmerge? Command lines are nice and all, but the biggest feature we miss as a small/medium sized business is the Exmerge utility.
Wake me when they release some kind of server-end support for clients like thunderbird/sunbird, evolution, etc. It shouldnt be the job of a major project like that to reverse-engineer MS's garbage.
Or just publish the specs and comply to the related standards... but let's not ask for the moon AND the stars, eh?
bundling the operating system? thats what it sounds like if the OS is a requirement....bad move on the part of redmond to make this mandatory in a recession.
this is the part where customers ask the question: if linux users dont have to install a new OS to get the latest mailserver/groupware...why the hell do i???
Good people go to bed earlier.
Finally. Sheesh. No reason why this couldn't have been implemented years ago instead of relegating them to OWA Lite.
Wow, it's kind of hard to believe, but there's actually something in this update that sounds like it'd be helpful. I think it's the first update to a Microsoft product in... I don't know... about 8-9 years where the update actually offers me something new that would actually be useful for me.
For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application. The only problem is that it has only ever really supported IE, and if you use any other browser, it reverted to a crappy version which was... ok. Not really very good, but yes, it worked.
Anyway, it's possible that I may consider buying an upgrade someday!
Exchange Server 2007 gave the bird to Thunderbird. Will Server 2010 support Thunderbird or Seamonkey? Or will Linux desktops be second class citizens in an Exchange Server corporate setup?
That's the only feature of interest to me...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array
Uh, WHAT!? Seriously, Microsoft? You're selling concatenation as a feature?
Anyone who thinks concatenation is a good thing, much less better than striping, needs to have whatever certifications they bought revoked.
You can setup rules for phone calls. Freaking awesome.
if (Status == b0rking_hot_secretary)
{
if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.wife.phonenumber)
call.redirect("/dev/null");
else if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.otherHotSecretary.phoneumber)
Send3WayInvite(caller);
}
But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I joined an MS consultancy in 1998 because they were supposedly the foremost developers in NYC of MS Exchange applications. Once I settled in, they told me they were expert enough in Exchange as a platform to know never to develop any apps on it, because it was so awful to develop for and to support. A piece of crap. I've never seen any evidence since then that Exchange got any better as an app platform.
Any clue as to whether the 2010 version will be any better? If it were, I'd expect Outlook/Exchange to take over the Internet. But that was possible over a decade ago, and MS totally blew it since then.
--
make install -not war
These were depreciated in Exchange07, and I'm presuming that they're still depreciated, but not altogether gone (in 07 you had to install them manually).
There's still a lot (okay, well, some) that depends on MAPI and CDO being available in Exchange.
I get an invite for a meeting and click "accept". (first and only mouseclick) It auto-syncs to my phone and 15 mins before the meeting, I get reminded of topic and room number. Ever tried that with SMTP?
Most big corporations will pump their outgoing mail through a real SMTP server before letting it loose on the net, and use a real SMTP to filter the incomming turdstream before it is allowed to hit Exchange though. And as far as standard complience goes, well I can send and receive VCards and VCals in Outlook/Exchange, try THAT in GMAIL...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Man Exchange is AWESOME! The only thing I love more is Lotus Notes.
Thanks, slashdot, for bringing this important and interesting update to my attention. Truly, news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Everyone should use PINE to read email and lynx to browse the web.
Of course, real men just telnet to the port and issue commands directly, then base64 decode the results in their head.
In all seriousness though, if all you want is e-mail and you're not managing thousands of users then exchange is overkill.
Exchange only gets sexy when you team it with outlook and use the more advanced features.
...
Good idea. Blame the company making the server you're favorite client can't keep up with. ...or you could just create an OSS version of exchange server.
Isn't that one of the major benefits of OSS? (or is it just another excuse for you to whine about commercial software?)
But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.
You can do that with Asterisk and some imagination
Avoid the MS tax, always buy I.B.M. PC's (I Built-it Myself)
"These were depreciated in Exchange07, and I'm presuming that they're still depreciated...i>
Yeah, I hear MAPI and CDO lose 40% of their value the first time you use them. Never treat them as an investment.
the DB has changed, which means you have to upgrade your Backup software.... if it's even supported yet.
Honestly. The adoption rate of Exchange 2007 was LOW and slow. Even when SP1 was released (after almost a year delay, btw), we're still stuck with this shitty command line interface that USED to be GUI to do all sorts of fun admin things in. It's a royal PITA to administer. How about an SP2 that will fix seemingly dead issues like OWA support for other browsers, etc? If MS thinks we and other companies that just spent thousands of dollars on the "bleeding edge" 2007 are going to pony up for 2010, they've got a surprise waiting. This is incrtedibly insulting.
I guess Ballmer realized how shitty everything was the company has done over the past 2-3 years since he took over and decided to move on.
Not at my workplace from within Outlook. :)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I work at a company with 2000 employees, many using mobile clients, with a pretty high turnover rate and a need for long term archiving. We rely on email for almost all of our communication, handling an average of 1,000 messages per hour, peaking at 15k per hour, pushing an average of about 250 kbits per second.
We use a combination of qmail, squirrelmail and Courier IMAP for mail, with our users trained to store older messages locally if they need them past one year.
What benefits (aside from calendaring) would we see from Exchange?
Messages older than a year are stored zipped on a disk array and tape. Since they use Maildir, they are easy as pie to view or restore.
We don't have a geographically different replicant in place, but it wouldn't be difficult to do this at all. We've switched from server to server and archive to archive with a tiny bit of a delay in service.
I get OWA from Firefox and Chrome all the time already on 2007, granted it's not quite as fancy as the IE one, but am I missing something there?
... and went right back to Outlook and Exchange when the owner and sales team complained that they didn't understand how to work Evolution, how the interface looked like it came from 1998, and how their calendars didn't work like Outlook calendars.
All I want from Exchange is for text/plain message to go into it and come out the other side without being scrambled. I don't want them to suddenly turn into multipart/alternative, with the text/plain alternative complete re-flowed and a text/html alternative created from nothing.
Our IT group managed to get that to stop, and every other kind of message (from outside Exchange) stopped working properly. (Of course, from MAPI and Outlook, this isn't an issue 'cause none of our UNIX servers can talk to MAPI.)
Or, if it's already possible, I want a big shiny button put in the control panel that says "leave text/plain SMTP messages alone".
...would we need a separate application for managing emails?
My gut feeling says no.
What about fixing the message size bug? And what about proper negotiation of authentication methods? ...
I'm looking forward to Microsoft's new innovations in de-commoditisation of internet protocols and services.
One of the most wonderful things about Exchange is how they artificially limit the size of the message store in order to get you to buy the "enterprise" version.
Why pay megabucks for that limitation when others give you 256 TB or more?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.
Avaya has a product called EC500. If you're running Avaya Communications Manager 3.0 or higher, you can utilize EC500. What it does is when a call comes into your extension, it will call your cell phone simultaneously. If you don't pick up your cell phone, it rolls back into your company's voicemail system.
Since our voicemail system uses Exchange as the message store, the voicemail pops up in my email, which I see on my cell phone because I'm using Exchange ActiveSync.
Cool part about EC500 is that you can turn it on and off. A button on your phone will turn it on and off while you're in the office, and your telecom admin can set up a special set of phone numbers to call from your cell phone to turn it on and off remotely. The good thing about being able to turn it on and off is that you're contacted on your cell phone whenever you want to be called on your cell phone. No more handing out your cell phone number; just your office number!
...the several Exchange servers I administer only constitute about 3% of the servers I am responsible for, so I don't really have time to focus on them as much as I would like.
You see, that's where you are going wrong. If you would just put in those five little minutes it takes to teach your sharks to calibrate the lasers on their heads properly so that they can focus them on those pesky Exchange servers the problem would soon go away.
Yes, exchange 2010 supports that as well.
Me too (Also used OWA Lite in FF for Windows); I've never found problems with OWA Lite.
Heck, I've seen "full" OWA (in those few times I've touched IE lately), and I'd say the full OWA interface is too cluttered, especially if you don't have a bazillion-inch monitor
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Not only the pricing, but this part is intriguing too:
Outlook protection rules
Automatically triggers Outlook to apply an RMS template to a message before it is sent
I suppose that means that a GPL V3 notice is attached whenever it notices that a user is attempting to email source code.
Take that! you GNU/Linux weenies!
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If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
We switched to Zimbra CE last summer. The Outlook users weren't happy initially since the calendar connector doesn't work. Heck, Thunderbird's is a read-only solution, IME. The web GUI is nice and works perfectly in most browsers. The only thing that didn't work in I.E. is moving the IM window around. IM works perfectly, just the drag and drop relocation of that pseudo-window didn't work in the version we have.
If Outlook compatibility is mandatory, the paid version, Zimbra NE, should make them happy. No experience with that here. Sorry.
OTOH, FREE - $0 is good. Runs on Linux. Uses lots of proven FOSS, but there are some limitations that are important to understand. My company is about to release a white paper on the subject.
Of course, MS-Exchange has some nice functionality that is hard to beat if you are an MS shop. Zimbra isn't the end-all, best value solution for everyone.
Well, look at Lotus Note/Domino. The original, pre-Internet application was essentially a document management and distribution engine. The E-mail bit was just a pre-built template you got with it. There was nothing special about that. An experienced administrator could cobble together other kinds of document distribution applications of equal sophistication for tasks like document approval or content management (although we didn't call it that).
Despite it's stylistic faults, I think this approach was conceptually sound. The problem was that so many of the really useful concepts, such as public key cryptographic message authentication and key management, were way beyond the average admin of the day. I attended a class once, and people just couldn't get their brains around the process of signing keys, which really isn't that conceptually challenging. I think once they got over that hump, they never wanted to learn anything else about the product.
The problem was rather than accept this made Notes a niche product, IBM tried to compete with Exchange. They didn't address the faults of Notes so much as try to copy Exchange, and then only superficially. The best part of Exchange is the ease of integrating calendar and e-mail. Since many people use e-mail anyway as a to-do list, integrating PIM and email is a must-do. The underlying document model of Notes should work very well with something like CalDAV, where calendars are basically collections of documents describing events. That shows the architecture is basically sound and they could have carved out a solid, high end niche. IBM just never put together a compelling "value proposition". They tried to chase Microsoft's taillights and lost.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You can setup rooles for phone corls. Freeekeeng awesome.
if (Status == borking_hot_secretary)
Fixed... err, cooked that for ya' :)