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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."
there are these entities called corporations/companies. they are required to follow a lot of laws and in some cases retain all communications for many years. Exchange makes this easy because it centralizes everything for easier management.
2010 looks more like 2007 R2. Same engine but more features and support for it's new ActiveSync partners, Google and Apple.
the archiving and legal features look nice. right now you have to buy add on products from EMC and other companies. Integrating the SOX features into Exchange will save customers a lot of money.
I've never used Microsoft Exchange Server in my life. Mostly because I'm more from a hippy FOSS type company.
Having read the Microsoft marketing crap, then the wikipedia article for a more neutral POV, I don't get it.
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
I often hear exchange server quoted as THE reason why some companies can't diversify their software from Microsoft, but that lot doesn't sound too compelling to me.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa142634(EXCHG.65).aspx
it isn't exactly normal SQL but it is alot closer than most things - and it does work.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Exchange works great with IMAP, even if it doesn't exactly follow the delete/expunge model of deletion (but then again, neither does Gmail).
I've used Thunderbird with Exchange 2007 with no problems.
Exmerge has been depreciated for years, primarily due to it not supporting the new PST formats.
In keeping with Exchange 2007's newfound love of PowerShell, you should use the Export-Mailbox and Import-Mailbox cmdlets to replace Exmerge.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Just enable IMAP support on the Exchange server, and it will work with any IMAP email client.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The FF experience sucks in comparison to IE. The OWA experience is almost exactly like the application itself when you're using IE. In FF it's more like a bad version of Gmail. Sadly I'm forced to use IE for my banking and for OWA. That's it. I'm actually excited to see FF support coming down the road.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Exchange has had support for mailbox journaling for a while now. It's not a new feature. Maybe in 2010, they just prettied up the process.
Big difference between Exchange 5 and Exchange of today. I've had issues with Exchange 5.5 servers and their quirkiness. I've also been running Exchange 2003 clusters that have been absolutely rock solid and almost completely bulletproof.
Mailbox journaling is not archiving.
Here is what most people mean by archiving. On notes (and now exchange) there's a server side policy/program that runs and moves mail that meets a defined criteria (say.. mail that is over 6 months old) and copies them to a new mail file. The user's can then access their archive from inside the client or via the web by clicking on a link or something and it takes them right to it.
It's really nice from a system administration perspective as it keeps mail file sizes down (increasing performance) on your main servers and you can use a series of low cost/lots of disk space servers as archiving servers as most people will only go into their archive once or twice a year so the load is very low.
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.
I think OWA (or whatever it was called at the time) was actually the first AJAX application. A while back, I was talking with someone from the Exchange team, and he said the team developed the XmlHttpRequest object that makes AJAX possible for the purposes of making OWA.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, no one really noticed until Google made GMail.
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 only that, but they make is so dirt cheap for the not for profit entities to buy, that it gets more entrenched there. I have numerous friends who are employed as admins in the Non-Profit Sector; and while most of them can get some FOSS in their enviroments; email isn't one of them.
Actually, one of the best things to have happened is Google Mail and Google Apps. I know that several large churches have moved all of their staff from Exchange to Google Mail; and more of them are coming. I also know several medium sized churches that have moved to both Google Mail and Google Apps. I've been using gmail for several years now, and under IMAP, it's pretty good. Granted, they have outages, but as of yet, I haven't lost any mail. I'm sure it will happen. but the important items are hard copies and filed anyway--mostly e-receipts from online bill payments; and I delete those from e-mail anyway.
Less headaches for the already overworked IT staff that also happens to work with the AV gear as well. And, with Google Apps--less to break at the desktop level.
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
..., and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application.
More aptly, is was THE first AJAX application. It doesn't get earlier than that.
This was years before it got its spiffy name. XmlHttpRequest (the linchpin in AJAX) was invented by Microsofts email client team to support Outlook Web Access. Being invented for IE it was (and still is AFAIK) a COM object which could be created from JavaScript in the browser. Mozilla later copied the idea and made XmlHttpRequest a first class citizen, but kept the name. The rest is history.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
You could even script the two together, to identify mailboxes larger than, say, 1 GB and then export items older than 180 days...
Seriously, RTFM.
Exchange database engine is also called "Jet", but it's a different kind of Jet: Access is Jet Red, Exchange is Jet Blue. The difference is explained here.
I think you've muddled the MAPI client and MAPI protocol together, so i'll clarify for you: MAPI as a client access method (ie the MAPI protocol) is built-in, and turned on by default. For Outlook clients who are on the same network as your Mailbox server(s), this is the default connection method. The MAPI client bits, however, are not included in Exchange server anymore. Really the only thing that i've found that this affects is the ability to export mail to a PST when working directly on a mailbox server. It's been replaced by a number of powershell commands (export-mailbox, import-mailbox), and can still be done on workstations with Outlook installed (because the MAPI client bits are part of Outlook).
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?
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with exchange all email is in the database
for Exchange 2003 you had to restore the db and there were ontrack powertools you bought to search the database file.
with 2007 and with 2010 they either have the ability to do this or it's coming in 2010. you just restore the database and search it. want to find all the emails that joe sent to jeff, just put in the search parameters and it will find it all.
no need for imap for mobile clients. if you don't have BES than winmo and iphones just sync the mailbox over the air. no need for a browser, you just use the integrated mail client.
exchange supports online backup so no downtime during backups. log backups mean you can do point in time restores. if you think someone got an email and deleted it right away, just do a point in time restore and search the db for it.
zimbra does this.
I've always wondered why email servers don't use database servers to store the email.
They do. They just don't expose their inner database.
Also, with SQL access, the could be many plugins for your mail client that would increase the value of the product.
And this is why. Your email server vendor does not want to hear from you when your 3rd party plugin has made your email database FUBAR. Or when some hotshot admin unleashes a cascade of table scans and no one can get their email.
Seriously. Have you even known off-the-shelf app with a database where the vendor said, "don't go in to the database, do all your work through the app" and customers actually listened and did not go in to the database?
Well...that depends on what you consider competition. If you're talking Exchange-look-a-likes, sure. But if your company is OK with a Good Reliable mail server with a separate calendaring app that integrates well with the mail app your company uses, you can get solutions dirt cheap or free.
I've configured a heck of a lot of unix mail servers, and I can't pretend any are as easy to setup and configure as Exchange. But every Exchange+Outlook solution I've used at a half dozen companies has been painfully slow and unreliable with piss-poor webmail. For how important mail is to most companies, I'm surprised they put up with Exchange.
Z-push will connect to almost any IMAP mail server and provide pushmail for all supported devices.
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Yes, with Calendar Server you can enter appointments somewhere and it will automatically update on every device you got connected to the calendar. There are also implementations that keep Calendars in IMAP folders although you would have to use the same (or at least compatible) software on desktop and mobile devices.
You can get push e-mail with IMAP, it's called IMAP IDLE. A lot of "push" services work in a similar way. Somehow the connection is kept open and the server sends a small packet when there's new mail. Bandwidth usage is minimal and implementation cheap and simple. I wouldn't be surprised if Exchange uses the same protocol but somehow encapsulates it into a proprietary layer (like they do with Kerberos and LDAP for AD)
Windows SBS is not the same as a dedicated Exchange box. Although the implementation depends largely on the administrator I think. Either way it can be done, Ubuntu doesn't have to pay CAL's though.
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As someone who has moved from a company that uses Exchange to a company that uses Lotus Notes, I can say for absolute certain that I would do almost *anything* to be using Exchange again. Without exception, everyone fucking hates Lotus Notes here.