Surveying Exchange 2007

ESM and Monad
The current ESM tool can be daunting to newcomers—its tree structure can be confusing even to experienced administrators. Learning which items in the tree control which settings or behaviors can take time. To make things simpler for administrators, Microsoft has dramatically revamped the appearance of the ESM console, as Figure 1 shows, moving to a three-pane design that looks like a less-cluttered ISA Server console. ESM is built totally on the Exchange Management Shell, which is an extended version of the Windows PowerShell ( formerly code-named Monad). This move is pure genius because it means that you can write scripts to do anything and everything that can be done in ESM. If you don't like the way some part of ESM works, you can write your own code to do things the way you want them done. (Microsoft hasn't announced any plans to let third-party code run within ESM's interface.) The Windows PowerShell is an extremely powerful and flexible scripting environment that you can extend by writing your own cmdlets (i.e., managed code objects) in C#, C++, or Visual Basic, and it ships with a broad set of cmdlets that you can use to configure Exchange directly.

In a move certain to generate discussion, Microsoft has decided to remove the Exchange-specific tabs that Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 add to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. So, in Exchange 2007, account-management tasks such as creating mailboxes or setting user mailbox limits will require use of the ESM tool (or a script); creating a new user with a mailbox will require both the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in and ESM.

Continuous Data Protection
Exchange 2007 breaks new ground by offering two new continuous-backup capabilities. Local continuous replication (LCR) makes a local copy of the Exchange database and log files on one server. Unlike disk mirroring, however, LCR makes a copy of the data by using Exchange APIs, so corrupted data isn't replicated like it would be on a mirrored disk. Clustered continuous replication (CCR) applies the same basic technology but lets you replicate data to another node in an Exchange cluster. CCR is big news because it essentially eliminates the requirement for a shared storage subsystem for your Exchange cluster—if you have enough bandwidth between nodes, you can easily build geographically distributed clusters. Accordingly, CCR will be huge for organizations wanting more disaster recovery flexibility, and LCR is a nice extension of "mini-high-availability" functionality to individual servers.

Web Services
One of the little-heralded new features of Exchange 2007 should be getting a lot more press: Exchange 2007 fully supports Web services. If you're not a developer, this news might not sound exciting—until you realize that Web services support unlocks all of the data in your Exchange store and all of the services Exchange offers by making them available to any Web services client. For example, I could easily write a Web services program on a Linux or Mac OS X workstation to access and manipulate data in an Exchange store or to request services (such as sending mail or playing a voicemail message) from a Windows Mobile device. Rather than the confusing mix of various APIs we need for Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003, the Web services support in Exchange 2007 offers a unified set of interfaces that should make developing Exchange-based applications significantly easier.

Unified Messaging
One of the most exciting new features in Exchange 2007 is support for unified messaging (UM). Third-party vendors (notably, Cisco Systems and Adomo) have offered products that tie voicemail systems to Exchange—Exchange 2007's UM features do that and much more. For example, you can use a telephone to call your Exchange server, log in, and ask it (via touch-tone or voice) to tell you about your next appointment, and you can access your voicemail directly from your Inbox.

I'm a huge fan of the telephone-computer integration that Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 offer; Exchange 2007 extends this integration so that Exchange acts as both a portal to and a storage mechanism for all types of communications. For example, the Unified Messaging server role provides a voice activated auto-attendant for incoming calls; provides Outlook Voice Access (OVA), a new telephone-based access method that supports text-to-speech (for reading your mail and calendar data to you) and speech-to-text (for figuring out what you say); and accepts and delivers voice messages to your Inbox for access through OWA 2007, Outlook 2007, or Windows Mobile clients.

Microsoft still hasn't announced a final list of which UM hardware and telephone systems the Exchange 2007 release version will support. In the meantime, you can test the Unified Messaging server role functionality by using a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) software phone that supports SIP over TCP.

Message Hygiene and Policy
Exchange 2007's spam filter will look familiar to anyone who's used Microsoft Exchange Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) in Exchange 2003. However, the filtering engine in Exchange 2007 is a good bit more flexible, and some exciting new capabilities exist. For example, when users modify their safe and blocked sender lists from Outlook 2007, their changes are passed to the Edge Transport servers for use in inbound-message filtering. Thus, the users' sender lists enhance inbound message filtering, rather than function solely to filter messages after they're delivered to the mailbox store. Exchange 2007 also implements a policy system that lets you filter inbound or outbound messages by content (including the presence, absence, or type of attachment), and the antivirus interface has been enhanced to allow third-party products to filter messages in transit, not just upon arrival at a mailbox.

Lots More to Talk About
Space limitations prevent me from telling you about every new feature in Exchange 2007 here. There's much more to discuss (such as integrated compliance features, automatic updating for the IMF, and Outlook 2007 integration) and, as with most major product releases, some of the features in Exchange 2007 that people will be most excited about are seemingly small. Let me mention two in particular.

• In previous versions of Exchange, you were limited to no more than 32KB of rules on a single mailbox. This limitation is removed in Exchange 2007, which will be welcome news to the many power Outlook users who want to create more complex systems of rules but haven't yet been able to.
• You can easily customize most of the system messages Exchange 2007 generates for things such as mailbox quota warning messages and nondelivery reports (NDRs). Given the number of requests for it I've seen since Exchange 4.0 shipped, this is quite possibly the most-requested Exchange feature ever.

Stay tuned for more coverage of Exchange 2007's new features and functionality.