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Voice Mail Preview will literally transform the way that you look at voice messages in Exchange.

Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) makes it easy to manage your voice messages by delivering them in your Inbox. You can then use many types of Exchange mail client software to review your voice mail. Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Outlook Mobile (and other clients connected via Exchange ActiveSync) and, of course Outlook Voice Access (the speech access interface in Exchange UM) are examples of the ways that you can now retrieve voice mail.

Figure 1. Exchange UM voice mail in the Inbox

If you're using a visual mail client such as Outlook to review your voice mail, it's great to see at a glance the message details (date/time, length) and the number or name of the sender. In Outlook and OWA, you can even add your own text in an Audio Notes field. This permits you to annotate the message so that you can see what it's about, should you return to it later. You can also search for the message by one or more words in the note, as you're used to doing for e-mail.

People who have used the Audio Notes feature since Exchange 2007 have surely sometimes wished that the annotations could be generated automatically.

In Exchange 2010, the Voice Mail Preview feature will do this, and more. By the time that a voice message arrives in your Inbox, UM can insert a Preview. This is machine-generated text that is derived from the voice recording. You can usually gain a good sense of the recorded content by looking at the Preview. Text in the Preview is indexed, so you can search for voice messages without Audio Notes. You can add additional information or make corrections through the Audio Notes field, if required.

Figure 2. Voice Mail Preview (sample message)

Figure 2 shows an example of an actual voice message with a Preview, which I received recently. Some of the text in the figure has been obscured to protect the identity of the caller. In this case, the caller was a telemarketer and I was able to glance at the message (which arrived while I was in a meeting and unable to play the audio) and decide that it was (how shall I put this?) not at all urgent.

In later articles in this series, I'll look at Voice Mail Preview in more detail, describing additional capabilities, how it works, and some limitations.

- Michael Wilson

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In my recent post Spotlight on Exchange 2010: Delivery Reports, I discussed Delivery Reports from an end-user perspective. In this post I'll review the different things administrators can do with message tracking. We'll discuss disclosure and privacy control settings and do a quick review on which roles have access to message tracking and how to grant access to a user or group of users.

Disclosure and privacy control

There are two settings that can be modified in the organizational configuration to change the level of disclosure of sensitive items in Delivery Reports: Read status reporting and subject logging.

Feature	Default Setting
Read Status Reporting	Disabled
Subject Logging	Enabled

Read Status Reporting

If this feature is enabled, a user requesting the Delivery Report for a particular message can see if that message was marked as read in the recipient's mailbox. Unlike read receipts, read status does not require a separate user action, if the message was marked as read at some moment by the email client, we report the status change and subsequent "mark-as-unread" activity won't affect the read status of the message.

Set-OrganizationConfig -ReadTrackingEnabled $true

Read status reporting is disabled by default, and can be enabled for every user in the organization by executing the following cmdlet in PowerShell:

After doing this, every Delivery Report shown to a user will include the read status of the message in the recipient's mailbox, for all the recipients in the organization, as we can see the following screen capture:

Keep in mind that if a message is marked as "Read", it means that the email client marked that message as read; both OWA and Outlook will, by default, mark messages as read if they are shown in the preview pane.

To give administrators more granular control over this feature once it is enabled in the organization, administrators can select individual users and disable read status reporting for messages in their mailboxes. This can be useful for users that handle sensitive information and the act of reading those messages should be kept hidden from others. For example, to disable the read status reporting for user Lubor Kollar from the Legal department, the administrator would execute the following PowerShell cmdlet:

Set-Mailbox "Lubor Kollar" -MessageTrackingReadStatusEnable $false

As we can see in the following Delivery Report, the read event is not being reported for the user:

Subject Logging

Administrators can also choose if the subject line for messages is stored in the message tracking logs for all emails sent or received within the organization. This is enabled by default, and can be disabled by the on-premise administrators. Disabling this feature is not an available option for datacenter administrators.

Before making the decision to disable this feature, administrators should consider the impact of the change to the end user's experience. Disabling subject logging will make it impossible to search for Delivery Reports using the subject field, so administrators should alert users that the subject field has to remain empty in all Delivery Report searches.

Get-TransportServer | Set-TransportServer -MessageTrackingLogSubjectLoggingEnabled $false
Get-MailboxServer | Set-MailboxServer -MessageTrackingLogSubjectLoggingEnabled $false

To suppress the logging of message subjects in the Message Tracking logs, on-premise administrators have to disable Subject Logging on each Mailbox Server and Transport server in the organization. For multi-role servers administrators would only have to disable this for either of the roles. Administrators can use the following PowerShell cmdlets to disable Subject Logging in all servers within the organization:

Administrative Roles

Currently users in the following security role groups can read Delivery Reports on behalf of other users:

• Organization Management
• View-Only Organization Management
• Recipient Management
• Records Management

New-ManagementRoleAssignment "Message Tracking - Help Desk" -Role "Message Tracking" -SecurityGroup "Help Desk"
Add-RoleGroupMember "Help Desk" -member msteele

To add Delivery Reports capabilities to the Help Desk role group and add the user Mark Steele as a member of the Help Desk group, execute the following PowerShell cmdlets:

So, the next time Mark Steele logs into ECP he will be able to use the "Select what to manage" dropdown to access the ECP Help Desk view for the organization; then by clicking on the "Reporting" tab he will access the administrator view of the Delivery Reports search pane, as shown on the screen shot below:

In the screenshot we can also see that the Administrator's view of the Delivery Reports search panel is somewhat different from the user view. In this view Administrators and Help Desk personnel can select a user mailbox using the "Mailbox to Search" field and make searches on behalf of that user in exactly the same manner that the selected user would.

- Alexis Delgado

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Professional Archive Manager for Exchange is a multi award winning email archiving software solution that utilizes its integrated HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) to direct all .PSTs, emails and their attachments to a central storage medium. Single Instance Storage (SIS) removes duplicates, stores the original email and its attachments onto a cheaper storage unit, and leaves behind a link on Exchange.

PeopleMinder is a simple, easy, and affordable way to alert users that their Windows password is about to expire. PeopleMinder allows administrators to schedule email notification to their end-users of an upcoming Active Directory password expiration. PeopleMinder is both a standalone product or available as an add-on to PeoplePassword.

PeoplePassword provides the most secure and flexible web-based self-service password reset tool for Windows in the industry. We have built PeoplePassword not only to be extremely intuitive for the end user to enroll and recover their Active Directory password, but also very powerful for the administrator to control security through built-in and customized profiles, questions, and question lists specific to a profile. PeoplePassword brings it all together for businesses of all sizes to implement a simple and secure self-service password reset tool.

A MAPI service provider that adds full newsgroup (NNTP) support into Outlook. Newsgroup articles can be stored in personal folders files (.pst) or in your Exchange mailbox folders and copied or linked to contact, task, journal and note items. NewsHound 3.0 adds the ability to retrieve messages and threads from Microsoft's web-based forums at social.microsoft.com, social.msdn.microsoft.com, social.technet.microsoft.com, social.answers.microsoft.com and social.expression.microsoft.com. Version 3.

This morning we became aware of a Twitter campaign run from the website http://fixoutlook.org. This campaign is intended to provide Microsoft with feedback about our decision to continue to use Microsoft Word for composing and displaying e-mail in the upcoming release of Microsoft Outlook 2010. The Email Standards Project, which developed the website that promotes the current Twitter campaign, is backed by the maker of “email marketing campaign” software.

First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents. Word enables Outlook customers to write professional-looking and visually stunning e-mail messages. You can read more about this in our whitepaper, outlining the benefits and the reason behind using Word as Outlook’s e-mail editor.

Word has always done a great job of displaying the HTML which is commonly found in e-mails around the world. We have always made information available about what HTML we support in Outlook; for example, you can find our latest information for our Office 2007 products here. For e-mail viewing, Word also provides security benefits that are not available in a browser: Word cannot run web script or other active content that may threaten the security and safety of our customers.

We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers.

As usual, we appreciate the feedback from our customers, via Twitter or on our Outlook team blog. 

-- William Kennedy
Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team
Microsoft Corporation

We've just announced the next 4 dates for the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) Exchange Program over at our web site. There are two more Exchange 2007 deliveries planned, in September and November, and then we kick of the 2010 material in March and May 2010. Exciting times!

We are still offering a discount for the 2007 programs so if you want to take advantage of that, I suggest you hurry on over to the site and have a look. You can also take a look at our blog for lots of useful background info, stories from past attendees, advice for potential attendees and more.

I'll answer a question that I'm sure will come up: Should I take the 2007 course or wait for 2010? Well, the answer to that is here. Go take a look and leave a comment if you want to.

-- Greg Taylor

One of the core functionalities provided by Exchange UM is call answering, i.e., to answer phone calls and record voice mails on your behalf. With the introduction of Call Answering Rules in Exchange UM 2010, you can dictate how incoming phone calls should be handled, thus enriching the call answering experience of your callers. In this article, we walk through the steps of creating a simple "default" call answering rule - one that is applied to all inbound phone calls.

I don't have any Call Answering Rule. So what?

Out-of-the-box, there are no Call Answering Rules created for you. All your callers will get the same default, call answering experience provided by UM 2007, i.e., callers will be prompted to leave you a voice message. Users who are satisfied with the default experience can continue to retain the same experience without the need to create any rule.

Creating a Default Call Answering Rule

As illustrated in Figure 1, the control for managing Call Answering Rules is located under ECP > Phone > Voice Mail tab. To create a new call answering rule, click on "New Rule".

Figure 1: Call Answering Rule Control

Anatomy of a Call Answering Rule

Each Call Answering Rule comprises two key aspects:

• Conditions - what criteria must be met before the rule can be applied to an inbound call.
• Actions - what options should be presented to the caller when all the conditions are met. These actions will be read to the caller over the phone and users can then pick an action using the phone keypad.

Figure 2 shows the form for creating a Call Answering Rule, which is divided into two columns. The right column displays the list of available conditions and actions you can use to build the rule. The left column displays the list of conditions and actions which have been added to the rule.

Figure 2: Call Answering Rule Form

Conditions

There are 4 classes of conditions supported by Call Answering Rules, including:

• Caller ID
• Time-of-the-day
• Free/busy status
• Automatic email reply is enabled/disabled

By using a combination of these conditions, you can create multiple Call Answering Rules and have them triggered for different phone calls. To create a default rule that will be applied to every call, you create a rule does not contain any condition. Since we are not adding any condition, I will not delve further into these conditions but leave them to my follow-up article.

Actions

There are 3 kinds of actions supported by Call Answering Rules, including:

• Find-Me
• Call Transfer
• Leave a voice mail

Adding a Find-Me action

When a caller selects Find-Me action, UM will attempt to locate you on up to 2 different phone numbers, and then connect you to the caller. To add a Find-Me option, click on "Find me at the following numbers". In the Find-Me dialog and with reference to my example in Figure 3 :

• You can optionally specify a context that will be read to the user. In my example, I have entered "important matters" to inform my callers that they should only select this action if they have important things to discuss.
• You need to associate the Find-Me action with a number on the keypad. This is the key which the caller has to press to select this action. In my example, I have also specified "1" as the DTMF key to be used.
• You also need to specify 1 to 2 phone numbers to be dialed. If 2 numbers are specified, they will be dialed in a sequential fashion, i.e., one after the other. Each phone number has an associated duration. This indicates how long UM should try dialing the phone number before moving on to the next number or revert back to the options menu.
• Click on Apply to add the Find-Me option and close the dialog.

Figure 3: Find-Me Dialog

Adding a Call Transfer option

By configuring a Call Transfer action, you provide callers with the option to be transferred to someone else. To add a Call Transfer option, click on "Transfer the caller to..." link. In the Call Transfer dialog and with reference to my example in Figure 4.

• You can optionally specify a context that will be read to the caller as part of this option. In my example, I have entered "Unified Messaging" to inform my callers that they can choose this option if they have questions around "Unified Messaging."
• You need to associate the Find-Me action with a number on the keypad. I have specified "2" as the DTMF key to be used for this option.
• You need to specify a transfer target for this option. This can be in the form of a phone number, or you can select an AD contact for the call transfer. When specifying the AD contact, UM will attempt to transfer the call to the UM extension of the AD contact. If the AD contact is not UM-enabled, the AD business phone number field will be used. In my example, I have selected my manager "Michael Wilson" as the transfer target.
• Click on Apply to add the Call Transfer option and close the dialog.

Figure 4: Call Transfer Dialog

Adding Voice Mail action

By default, the Voice Mail option is automatically added to each Call Answering Rule. If you do not wish to offer this option, you can remove it by clicking:

 

To add the option back, simply click "Leave a Voice Message."

Saving the rule and trying it out

Prior to saying the rule, you need to give a meaningful name to the rule you've created. After which, you click on the SAVE button to create the rule. Next, you should test to see if the call answering rule is working as desired by trying to call your UM-enabled phone extension and wait for the call to be answered by UM.

Optional: Record a customized greeting

You can record a custom greeting for each rule. By default, UM will generate a default greeting based on the actions you have configured. To record a custom greeting, you can click on:

 

in the Call Answering Rule form and UM will call you up to record a greeting.

Note: In your recording, you should include any actions you have configured on the rule itself. UM will not list the actions if a custom greeting is present.

-Chun Yong Chua

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Is reducing or controlling the high cost of the power to run and cool computer hardware is a top priority for your organization? Are you considering server virtualization solutions to reduce your server footprint and the associated power and cooling costs?

Because the virtualization of Microsoft Exchange servers rarely results in a reduction of physical processors, there is some question as to whether there is significant hardware, power, cooling, or space savings from virtualizing correctly-sized Exchange Server 2007 server roles. The answer to this question can be found in a new White Paper we just released about a study that was done internally, entitled "Comparing the Power Utilization of Native and Virtual Exchange Environments." This study compared the power utilization of native and virtual Exchange server environments in a scenario in which the number of physical servers was reduced from eight to two, but the total number of logical processors and the amount of memory remained the same. It examined power utilization of native and virtual Exchange 2007 environments in a scenario where physical servers were reduced from 8 to 2 but the total number of logical processors remained constant at 32. There was no processor core consolidation, and storage power utilization was not included. In this scenario, there was a 50 percent reduction in server power utilization and a projected savings of 8,582 kWh/year.

For more details about the study and its conclusions, check out the White Paper, "Comparing the Power Utilization of Native and Virtual Exchange Environments."