Unified Comm

A long title overall but that pretty much sums up my favorite new feature of Exchange 2007. It will most likely change again as time goes on but I've always fought with RUS in the past and now that changes will no longer be asyncronous, I am very happy.

Runner up is the '-whatIf' functionality in PowerShell.

If anything, I think this shows that the Live Communications Server team and the Exchange team were talking before they merged into the Unified Communications team.

This feature reminds me of the 'publishing' you do with LCS so that you don't have to individually configure each workstation to find the right server for your environment. It also replaces/suppliments the Free/Busy system from earlier versions of Exchange.

It isn't going to work out of the box so it will require some setup, but overall, it is a lot better than the previous methods you had to use with the custom installation wizard/etc. Publish the right information on your intranet site, and your Outlook 2007 clients will automagically configure themselves when given a little bit of information about the user account.

Excellent.

http://www.exchangeninjas.com/AvailabilityServiceFAQ

This might be a fluke but overall, the 'ping times' and amount of overall connections made and broken over the link seems to be much less compared to Outlook 2003. This is with Exchange 2003 SP2 as the server, so whatever changes have happened, seem to be backwards compatible. I suspect they are taking advantage of keep-alive connections more than before but without doing a full network trace, I can't be sure.

This is just an armchair observation over a mobile phone data connection back to the server. Not entirely scientific. It does look like there are a few more fields that show up when you do 'Outlook /rpcdiag' also.

It is a hotfix you have to request but if you need the functionality, it is available.

More information here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920185

I was curious what exactly spurred on this feature being added in between service packs/server releases when I bumped into a "Rapid increase in database size" KB article, that specifically mentions some misbehaving "3rd party search engines" integrated into Outlook - KB 919207 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919207

KB 919207 mentions KB 920185 as a possible fix for the problem. I'm curious what search engine/program is making the transaction logs increase in size that much.

One of the driving forces behind me getting more involved in clustering is the upcoming support for CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication). It also explains why KB 921181 came out around the same time that the public betas of Exchange were released. KB 921181 adds support to Windows 2003 for some of the features needed to use/enhance/enable CCR.

A much more involved video series can be found here:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/08/09/428642.aspx

I've just started to dig into the website but I like what I see so far. Learning PowerShell/MSH is going to be useful for anyone adopting Exchange 2007.

http://www.exchangeninjas.com/