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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.'
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.
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.
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.
..., 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*
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).
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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