Microsoft officially released a public Beta of Exchange 2010 which was formerly code named ‘Exchange 14”. I was already blinded by the features that Exchange 2009 provided – Unified Messaging being the best of the many and now we have Exchange 2010 in the pipeline. There are so many improvements in this version that I can’t decide which ones to highlight and talk about first. The product claims to achieve high levels of reliability with greater flexibility, enhanced user experiences and increased protection for business communications.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) has been scaled out to support Internet Explorer – 7 and 8, Firefox 3 and Safari 3. Users will no longer be restricted to using Internet Explorer. OWA has been further improved to provide a web user with all the functionality of Outlook desktop client. Also, a new feature of conversation view has been added greatly reducing mailbox clutter.

Voice Mail Preview is another feature that deserves applause. OWA and Outlook 2010 support voice mail previews. Exchange 2010 automatically generates text based preview of a voice mail message received. Not sure how accurate this is going to be but the concept itself is worth it.

Users will be able to create and moderate their own Distribution Groups and can also decide who they want their Calendar and Contacts shared with.

Ever got bounce backs after sending emails with large attachments or accidently sent a personal email to everyone in your company? Now you need not worry about that. MailTips is a new feature added up which prompts you before you send a message.

Message Tracking and Delivery Reports has been improvised in Exchange 2010 – works well inside the Exchange Organization and federated servers.

No more Administrator privileges required to scan or search other mailboxes in the organization to meet compliance. Authorized users can perform MultiMailbox Searches without the use of administrative rights.

Self service via Exchange Control Panel (ECP) is now made available to the end-user. This means that a user can now update their personal details in their account which earlier required a help desk call or ticket.

Database portability and multiple options for high availability were already made available in Exchange 2009. These have been further improved in Exchange 2010 and also open possibilities of reducing the operations costs. Database Availability Groups now gives redundant mail stores with continuous replication. Database-level Failover gives automatic recovery and the I/O optimizations make Exchange 2010 better suited for SATA drives.

These are just some of the powerful features that have been released in the Beta. We may be having a few more added to these in the final specimen. Overall the new version of Exchange looks very promising and exciting.

Moving mailboxes or mailbox store is a piece of cake in Exchange 2007. Recently, I had to go through a task where the mailboxes need to be moved from one server to another in different datacenter. All that was required to do is copy the EDB files after checking for a Clean Shut Down state. Created same store names on the new server, marked the DB so that I could be overwritten with a restore, copied the old EDB files over the new DB’s in new server and mounted the database on the new server.

There it was. All mailboxes along with data moved to new server. The only thing left there after was to update the configuration of the mailboxes using Powershell to point to the new server. Thank you to the team at Microsoft for making this less painful compared to Exchange 2003.

Currently, I’m working on a project doing a migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 which has approximately 1500 users. The goal is not only to upgrade or migrate to the Exchange 2007 organization but also to shift the entire organization to a new datacenter all the while keeping in mind to minimize downtime. This post does not talk about the migration plan, but about a small trick that was deployed.

When migrating to Exchange 2007 from an exisiting organization, Exchange remains in a coexistence mode unless all mailboxes are migrated to 2007 and the 2003 servers are taken out. This means that during the migration process some users would be having their mailboxes on 2007 while some may be having their mailboxes on 2003. Users accessing their email via OWA, Outlook Anywhere, ActiveSync, Blackberry or RPC/HTTP should not be affected during this transition.

To overcome this, I setup the CAS role on a Virtual while keeping the HUB and Mailbox role on a physical machine. Isolating the CAS allows Exchange 2007 to proxy the requests to the Exchange 2003 organisation. Users who have their mailboxes on 2007 are presented with the new 2007 OWA login from https://yourdomain.com/owa while users with their mailboxes on 2003 still need to go to https://yourdomain.com/exchange. In order to ensure things worked right for RPC/HTTP, webmail, etc. I wrote a script and put it under the Default Site. Here is the script:

Now accessing the URL which the users originally used to access Outlook Web Access presented the users with a new interface of OWA from Exchange 2007. Users who had their mailboxes on Exchange 2007 were given the OWA 2007 experience while those who were having their mailboxes on Exchange 2003 – the request was automatically proxied to the Backend Server and they were presented with the experience of OWA 2003.

I have an O2 XDA IIs which I wanted to sync over GPRS with my Exchange server in the office. Activesync used to work smoothly when I used to put the phone in the cradle but it failed to sync whenever I tried to sync it over GPRS or Wi-Fi connection.

I found that the problem was with communication over SSL (Secure Socket Layer) because the Exchange virtual directory in Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) is configured to accept only Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections on our server. Naturally this has been done to keep the security in place and to ensure that no passwords are sent out in clear text since Basic Authentication is enabled and Integrated Authentication is turned off.

Upon further research I found that Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync and Outlook Mobile Access virtual directories only try to connect with the Exchange virtual directory over TCP port 80 (HTTP) and does not make use of TCP port 443 (HTTPS).

I also tried adding Root Certificate to the PDA using the Microsoft solution as highlighted in their KB — but things do not work so easily for me — ANYTIME. It’s always hard work.

The best option was to take off SSL for OMA and ActiveSync. I exported the configuration of Exchange directory from IIS and imported the same under ActiveSyncPDA. After the import I removed SSL option from the virtual directory. The next step was to add a new parameter in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesMasSyncParameters

and set it to point to the new virtual directory called ActivesyncPDA.

Restarted IIS and this time the sync from PDA worked over GPRS and Wi-Fi connections.