written by admin on Oct 30, 2009
Three weeks ago we announced that Exchange 2010 was code complete. As we get ready for launch, we're seeing some amazing results from our early adopter customers. Julia White, Director of Exchange Marketing, shares some of these early highlights on the Unified Communications Blog.
Check out her post and see how Exchange 2010 (and you) can do the work of 4 or 5 other servers - and do it better and more cost-effectively.
written by :: Microsoft Outlook Forum :: on Oct 29, 2009
This week, the Outlook product team hosted a .pst file format interoperability event here on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. As we announced on the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog, our team plans to release a specification of the .pst file format to the public. This week’s interoperability event is part of a series of steps that we are taking to gather feedback from industry partners and experts on preliminary drafts of the specification. If you are not familiar with the underpinnings of Outlook, .pst files are one type of data file that Outlook uses to save user data such as e-mail messages, contacts, and appointments.
During the interoperability event, we presented a preliminary specification of the .pst file format to selected industry experts in areas such as antimalware, electronic records management, data archiving, data recovery, and data migration. We collected useful feedback about our documentation roadmap, and the attendees were supportive of the direction and approach we are taking.
We understand our plan to document the .pst file format might cause some of our customers and partners to wonder about our commitment to MAPI (Messaging API) and the Outlook Object Model as interoperability mechanisms of Outlook. To us, the .pst file format specification doesn’t change the role of MAPI and the Outlook Object Model. While we are pleased to provide another mechanism to access data stored in .pst files, we continue to support MAPI and the Outlook Object Model as key elements of Outlook interoperability and extensibility. We do expect that the release of the .pst file format specification will open up new usage scenarios that were previously difficult to accomplish, especially in multi-platform and server scenarios where MAPI and the Outlook Object Model are not available.
Since we announced our plan to release the .pst file specification, we have received requests from people who want to participate in the review of early drafts of the specification. If you are interested in actively participating in the review of preliminary drafts of the .pst file format specification, send an email message to pstinfo@microsoft.com and then we will contact you when a preliminary draft of the specification is ready for broader review. If you only are seeking the final version, we anticipate releasing the .pst file format specification in the first half of 2010 under our Open Specification Promise.
Daniel Ko
Outlook Development Manager
written by admin on Oct 29, 2009
written by admin on Oct 28, 2009
We've got a great webcast coming up next week to discuss recommendations for virtualizing Exchange server and the benefits of choosing Hyper-V + System Center as your virtualization solution.
TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for Exchange Server (Level 300)
Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 10am Pacific time
Virtualizing business critical applications will deliver significant customer benefits including cost savings, enhanced business continuity and an agile and efficient management solution. This session will focus on virtualizing Exchange using Microsoft solutions, the benefits over key competitors such as VMware, and guidance for virtualizing Exchange for various Production scenarios. We will go into technical details with best practices. Customer evidence and results from lab deployment tests will also be discussed.
written by admin on Oct 28, 2009
written by :: Microsoft Outlook Forum :: on Oct 28, 2009
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 delivered the first version of our Unified Messaging (UM) experience from the Microsoft Exchange and Outlook teams. UM enables you to receive voice mails and FAXs in your Outlook Inbox. You can listen to voice mail messages while in Outlook or on your phone.
In Outlook 2010, we’ve added some cool new features to Unified Messaging, including Voice Mail Preview, protected voice mail, and Call Answering Rules to make the UM experience even more compelling. All of the features described below require an account on an Exchange 2010 server, and work with both Outlook Web App and Outlook 2010. There is also more to Unified Messaging with Exchange 2010 than I’ve mentioned below, so look for more information about the complete set of new Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging features.
Voice Mail Preview: Using Microsoft Speech technology, every time you receive a new voice mail message, the Exchange Unified Messaging server creates a transcript of the voice message and adds it to the voice mail message in your Inbox. With Voice Mail Preview, you can read what the caller said without playing the voice mail message. This is especially useful when you are somewhere that you can’t listen to the audio (like reading your messages during a meeting).
The preview text is not always 100% accurate due to the limitations of automated speech recognition technology. To accommodate for this, you can easily click a word in the preview text and the voice mail audio around that word is played. This lets you jump around in the audio to only the words that seem incorrectly transcribed. This feature is great when you want to double-check a phone number, date, or other key word that is important in the message.
Protected Voice Mail: One of the biggest points of feedback we heard last release about voice mail in Outlook was that IT administrators wanted a way to prevent voice mail messages from being casually forwarded to other employees. This release, we’ve added support for using Office Rights Management to protect a voice mail message marked private (or if your corporate policy mandates all voicemail messages be marked private). When a message is protected, it cannot be forwarded, but still has the same rich experience in Outlook and OWA.
Call Answering Rules: Another great feature that’s new to the Outlook and Exchange 2010 release is the Personal Call Attendant. The Personal Call Attendant gives you the flexibility to control how your calls are routed when you aren’t at your desk. For example, you can build a call routing guide to give callers the option to contact another employee (perhaps your manager or your back up), forward the call to your mobile phone, or leave a voice message. You can even customize which options callers receive based on whether they are in your contacts list.
This is just a quick look at some of the new features provided by Unified Messaging in Outlook and Exchange. If you’re interested in more details, take a look at the Exchange blog or TechNet.
Ryan Gregg
Outlook PM
written by admin on Oct 27, 2009
This is an update to the blog post Next version of Exchange and Single Label Domain (SLD) policy under review.
In response to customer feedback, the Exchange team has updated their testing matrix and has determined that Exchange Server 2010 will be supported on Single Label Domains (SLD), Disjoint Namespaces, and Discontiguous Namespaces. This post contains a brief description of each of these scenarios and special considerations. If you intend to install Exchange 2010 into one of these environments you need to read the documentation about the applicable subject.
In adding support for these types of topologies, there is an underlying requirement for DNS to be properly installed and configured. Before proceeding with any deployment defined here, clients and servers must be able to reliably resolve DNS queries for a given resource in the appropriate namespace.
Single Label Domains
Single-label DNS names are DNS names that do not contain a suffix such as .com, .corp, .net, or .org. For example contoso would be an SLD while contoso.com, contoso.net, or contoso.local would not be an SLD.
Not a recommended configuration
While Exchange 2010 is supported with SLDs, the Exchange product team's view is that SLDs are not a recommended configuration, and may not be supported by future Exchange versions. Other Microsoft or third party applications that you want to run in your environment may not be supported on an SLD. This could have an adverse effect on your environment. While we will allow installation of Exchange 2010 in an SLD, we strongly recommend that you take steps to move your organization out of this configuration.
Disjoint Namespaces
A disjoint namespace scenario is one in which the primary DNS suffix of a computer does not match the DNS domain name where that computer resides. The computer with the primary DNS suffix that does not match is said to be disjoint. Another disjoint namespace scenario occurs if the NetBIOS domain name of a domain controller does not match the DNS domain name.
Exchange 2010 and Disjoint Namespaces
In Microsoft Exchange 2010, there are three supported scenarios for deploying Exchange in a domain that has a disjoint namespace. The supported scenarios are as follows:
For more information on Exchange 2010 and disjoint namespaces see Understanding Disjoint Namespace Scenarios.
Special Considerations
Discontiguous Namespaces
A discontiguous namespace, also referred to as non-contiguous namespace, is one in which the domains in a forest are not defined hierarchically. If the domains in a forest have discontiguous DNS names, they form separate domain trees within the forest. An Active Directory forest can have one or more domain trees. An example of a multi-tree forest would be a forest containing the domains, contoso.com and fabrikam.net. Note: contoso.com and contoso.net in the same forest would be an invalid configuration. This is because they would both be using a NetBIOS name of contoso in their respective domains. In the case of discontiguous DNS namespaces, each domain must still register a unique legacy NetBIOS domain name.
Special Considerations
For discontiguous namespaces, DNS must be configured such that Exchange servers are able to resolve all domain names in the environment. It is also a requirement that msds-allowedDNSSuffixes be configured within the Active Directory environment for all namespaces used within the forest. For instructions on configuring this, please see the Tech Net article "Understanding DNS Client Settings."
Exchange 2010 System Requirements
For more information on Exchange 2010 System Requirements please see the Tech Net article "Exchange 2010 System Requirements"
- Ed Beck
written by admin on Oct 27, 2009
written by admin on Oct 27, 2009
written by admin on Oct 26, 2009