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First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta

Posted by Soulskill on from the united-federation-of-mail dept.

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."

16 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. And all the admins ask... by mbourgon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What database engine is it using, and can we access it via SQL?

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    1. Re:And all the admins ask... by Kamokazi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I was able to set up a working Exchange 2007 server in 2 days. I had never configured an e-mail server before. I'm not even an MCSA (well MCTS woudl be the new name for it)....really only about halfway to it.

      So it's even easier than you say it is :-) But you are absolutely correct...you need a competent admin to do it right (I know I sure as hell didn't do it right...it was just a test box)...they don't necessarily have to be an "E-mail Admin" to do it right, they just need to be competent enough to follow best practice guidelines (and obviously have a basic understanding of how e-mail works...any of your 'MCSE monkeys' should have that).

      And that is a big part of why Exchange predominates...it's easily administered, and it has features that nothing else offers on an equivalent level.

      Also keep in mind that it's not just the PHB's being resistant to change that stops OSS...it's the fact that Microsoft does a good job of making sure that their stuff integrates with eachother very well (and they don't exactly go out of their way to make sure other stuff can integrate with their products). The reason Exchange was so easy to get up and running for me is due in large part to Active Directory integration, and ISA Server 2006 is basically preconfigured to allow an Exchange server the proper access just by telling it the IP address.

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    2. Re:And all the admins ask... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      MSFT has tried moving Exchange to SQL Server several times and have never even reached performance parity. SQL Server is great, but the Exchange engine is faster at e-mail type workloads.

      Also, don't confuse the Exchange database engine with Jet, which was part of Access/Office.

    3. Re:And all the admins ask... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Any of the MCSE monkeys can administer the Exchange server. No they cant administer it correctly but they can administer it.

      Let's hear it for backscatter where the return path is an exchange server on a company intranet.

      I also dont understand the love affair with outlook

      Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.

      I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo. I suppose I'm going to be asked to append a disclaimer next, then he and his CxO chums can have a little competition over who has the most obnoxious and unenforcable email disclaimer. Such is the mentality of outlook users!

      /rant

    4. Re:And all the admins ask... by jonbryce · · Score: 2, Interesting

      With Darwin Calendar Server, can I enter appointments on Outlook or similar on the desktop, and have them automatically update on my phone?

      Can I get push email on my phone, or do I have to have the added bandwidth and battery overhead of polling an IMAP server every few minutes?

      As for setup time, from my perspective, I installed Small Business Server, and Exchange and Sharepoint came already set up. That was a lot less than two days. Windows 2003 itself is slightly more difficult to install than Ubuntu, but not much.

    5. Re:And all the admins ask... by V!NCENT · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem with Microsoft products is that everybody can set it up, but almost no-one that does that knows how to configure it the right way. Defaults? Rofl...

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    6. Re:And all the admins ask... by trawg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You are spot on. We recently evaluated Zimbra; it's good, but a) it's not all OSS (the fucking Outlook connector, dammit, is a must have) and b) it's a bit fiddly sometimes.

      I've tested a stack of different calendaring apps and have found them all inferior to Outlook in almost every respect. It's just so easy to use. I'm trying really, really hard to prevent us going to Exchange, but I'm running out of reasons.

      I'm really, really hoping Thunderbird 3.0 / Sunbird 1.0 will make an impact here. If there's one market that OSS will really make a difference in its the groupware market.

  2. Re:Blah by ender81b · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The archiving feature alone really fixes a gap in Exchange server. Say what you will, but it's ridiculous that it doesn't have any archiving abilities (and no, localto workstation archiving doesn't count) that even remotely compare to notes.

  3. Decent OWA?! by nine-times · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  4. Re:Blah by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    So does a server with SMTP+POP+IMAP+Jabber.

    SOX requires you to disclose certain things, and to have policies in place to allow you to disclose certain other things on demand. In terms of SOX compliance, there are no serious barriers in your way when rolling a solution from FoSS; indeed, such a solution is provided for you turnkey if you like, by purchasing it from Red Hat or perhaps from IBM.

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  5. Horrible Application Platform by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Re:Concatenation a feature?!?! by TopSpin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone who thinks concatenation is a good thing, much less better than striping...

    Concatenation, by itself, would certainly be unwise. I'll give Exchange admins the benefit of the doubt and assume this "concatenation" is in addition to whatever redundancy features are provided.

    From the story:

    JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array

    I find that statement confusing. Why is Exchange, a mail server/collaboration platform/etc., managing storage devices? Is the story conflating Windows Server 2008 features with Exchange, or is Exchange directly responsible for storage devices (like Oracle ASM)?

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  7. MAPI/CDO by wandazulu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Spam To Be Canned By 2006 by theSpitzer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Get yourself a barracuda or two. I know our College's barracudas blocked 12 million emails last year and only let 2.5 million (ideally, legit ones) through. And we STILL get spam in our inboxefrom time-to-time. Awfully hard to catch when they embed their garbage in images as opposed to text.

  9. Re:ever used a calender? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm fairly sure OpenGroupware.org (or, SOGO, at least) supports everything you've described, and does so via open protocols like CalDAV, IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, and so on.

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  10. Re:Now Let's Talk Pricing by vegiVamp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm sure you mean "compared to the competition on wintel" ?

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