5 Things You Should Know About Exchange 2007

4: The Server Becomes Your Secretary
Exchange 2007 includes some spiffy new features targeted directly at end users. Chief among them are improvements to calendaring and resource booking, including a new service, Calendar Concierge, that runs on the server and tentatively accepts meeting requests. Why is Calendar Concierge such a big deal? Imagine that you're an Exchange 2003 user who's using OWA or a mobile device as the primary means of accessing your mailbox. Outlook will tentatively add meeting requests to your calendar, but only when it's running. If you don't use Outlook, or if you're frequently disconnected because you're traveling, your calendar free/busy data won't be up to date. The Calendar Concierge fixes this by handling meeting requests for you; it also consolidates multiple updates for the same meeting so the updates don't clutter up your inbox. (Figure 4, shows OWA's improved calendaring interface.)

The new Scheduling Assistant in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 also takes advantage of a new server-side component, the availability service. This service provides real-time free/busy information directly from users' mailboxes; it replaces the old Schedule+ Free/Busy system public folder for Outlook 2007 clients. In addition to finding the best possible meeting time for all invited attendees, the availability service lets you specify more granular permissions for your free/busy data. For example, you can control who can see ordinary free/busy data (as you can in Exchange 2003/Microsoft Office Outlook 2003), then grant access to additional calendar data (including the meeting description, location, and so on) to a subset of people who need that access. This is both easier to manage and more secure than the conventional delegation model, and it's much simpler for users to set up.

From a design and deployment perspective, the use of these services means that the CAS role will assume equal importance with the mailbox server in terms of what users need to get their jobs done. Microsoft hasn't yet issued any recommendations about whether dedicated CAS servers are required for given topologies, but no doubt the company will do so as we get closer to the Exchange 2007 release to manufacturing (RTM) date.

5: Outlook and Exchange: A Beautiful Friendship
Outlook 2007 and Exchange 2007 work better together. Big surprise, right? Apart from the Scheduling Assistant, Outlook's other big Exchange-specific feature is its new automatic discovery feature, which lets you set up Outlook profiles based only on the user's email address—Outlook will query an Exchange 2007 autodiscovery server, which in turn will query AD to find the user's mailbox server and the rest of the necessary configuration information. Once Outlook gets the necessary data back from the autodiscovery service, it can automatically create the user's profile, even for remote procedure call over HTTP (RPC over HTTP) connections.

Outlook 2007 also enables another useful Exchange 2007 feature: tailored out-of-office notifications. Users can create separate out-of-office messages for internal and external users and set a start time and stop time for the period for which they want out-of-office messages to be sent. However, administrators will still control which users can send out-of-office messages to the outside world.

Just the Beginning
There's far more to Exchange 2007 than I can cover in a single article, but this preview should help point out some features, functionality, and concerns that you need to keep in mind when designing your Exchange 2007 messaging environment. We'll continue to cover Exchange 2007's new features, both here and online, but this should be enough to whet your appetite for more.