Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 is a far cry from Exchange Server 2003, based on eWEEK Labs’ tests of the first public beta of the new messaging platform. Administrators thinking of moving to Exchange Server 2007 should take a hard look at this beta to understand the impact of the platform’s many new features. Exchange 2007 Beta 2 became widely available on July 24 and is expected to ship in its final form at the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007.
[lame joke]
yeah, it is. I was able to access reviews about 2003. these ones are either so fast that I read them before I relized I did or non-accessible and served on that exact release they are describing.
[/lame joke]
translation: is there mistake in link?
update: suddenly started to work, and all I can say is nice work on OWA.
Edited 2006-07-24 21:29
As an avid MS-detractor, I’m pleased that they have improved and expanded the functionality of the outlook web access interface. This is the only remotely open protocol for communicating with Exchange Server and is used by products such as Evolution’s Exchange plugin. The more they do to expand the feature set and performance of OWA in order to support more flexible access options (i.e. mobile devices), the more functionality becomes available to alternative Exchange clients as well.
I agree. Back in 2003, I reverse-engineered their OWA+WebDAV interface for a web telephony server for a Siemens C# product. I guess they liked the idea enough to have incorporated that work into their new 2007 version.
Is Exchange 2007 supposed to have any kind of native xml access to mailboxs/messages/etc. through soap or something besides the XML-RPC from 2003?
Is Exchange 2007 supposed to have any kind of native xml access to mailboxs/messages/etc. through soap or something besides the XML-RPC from 2003?
Exchange Web Services is a programmable interface that enterprise and independent software developers can use to provide client access to Exchange store data and information management functions. Exchange Web Services handles Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages sent over HTTP. By using Exchange Web Services, you can improve the efficiency of administrators and information workers in your organization.
Exchange Web Services improves programmable access to core business data and functions. By using industry-standard technology, Exchange Web Services provides heterogeneous servers and clients access to the same business-critical data. Exchange Web Services includes the following Web services:
• Autodiscover Provides configuration information for setting up client applications that connect to mailbox servers.
• Availability Provides free/busy data about a user’s mailbox. The free/busy data is also used to identify suggested meeting times and provides client Out of Office (OOF) management functionality.
• Messaging Records Management Enables the assignment of Managed E-Mail folders to mailbox users.
• Notification Notifies the client application of events that are associated with a mailbox. The subscription model can be either push- or pull-based.
• Synchronization Provides a one-way synchronized cached copy of a user’s folders and items.
• Exchange Data Service Provides the following features:
• Functions to create, update, delete, copy, find, get, and move folders that are associated with a mailbox user, and also the ability to find items that are contained in a folder.
• Access to the Exchange data store. A client application can create, update, delete, copy, get, move, and send items by using the Exchange Data Service Web service.
• Ambiguous name resolution.
• The ability to return the members of distribution list.
• Access to attachments in the Exchange store.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/E2k7Help/4087…
Also check out the Exchange Team’s Blog
http://msexchangeteam.com/
Edited 2006-07-24 23:28
They mentioned on one of the exchange developers’ websites that OWL light will feature for Mozilla browsers and will be much improved from Exchange 2003.
Has anyone seen any screenshots of this in action?
Can’t find any shots of Light. There’s some video (WMV) of the interface at
http://msexchangeteam.com/videos/9/owamobility/entry427718.aspx
Cheers for that!
Which unix or open source email server would you use as a backup for the unreliable Exchange server. You know, so you don’t get fired for a 12 hour outage?
Can anyone recommend a high quaility unix or open source email server?
Anything…..solaris, linux, whatever.
Can anyone recommend a high quaility unix or open source email server?
Well pickup up a stable operating system (like debian linux of freebsd) and build up the platform you prefer, there are tons of secure and stable smtp,pop3,imap server
personally I run postfix+courier imap and pop3 with sasl auth and a mysql db for users
I suggest Solaris running JES as an Exchange replacement. I’d wait for the fall release of JES5 though. It does just about everything exchange does. Postfix/Exim are good MTAs, but that’s all they are. JES can pretty much entirely replace exchange, it does calandering, address books, mail (webmail and imap/pop/smtp), directory server, etc. It’s used in enterprise with 100,000+ accounts all the time. It is also fault-tolerant if you wish for it to be.
I guess by “Hard Look” (wink wink nudge nudge)…they really mean…..
RUN THE HELL AWAY IT EATS BABIES!
MIGRATE TO LINUX NOW BEFORE IT DESTROYS US ALL!
I see….
“Can anyone recommend a high quaility unix or open source email server?”
You can use Linux or some of the BSD like OpenBSD or FreeBSD. As mail server postfix or exim.
If you are looking for something thats like Exchange, but runs on Linux, try out Zimbra.
You mentioned Zimbra, and here’s a review of it and Scalix (formerly HP Openmail): http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/03/23/76503_13TCmessage_2.html
Scalix is also available and incorporated into Xandros Server: http://www.xandros.com/products/business/server/intro.html
Review: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/17/151239
Xandros is based on Debian GNU/Linux and KDE 3.4.x
Scalix: http://www.scalix.com/
Compare Editions: http://www.scalix.com/products/compareeditions.html
Accolades: http://www.scalix.com/customers/accolades.html
Scalix supports RTF and the Exchange proprietary TNEF message format, uses the Apache Tomcat web server instead of IIS used by Microsoft Exchange Server, and allows Outlook email clients to maintain full groupware functionality.
Microsoft finally realized that the Exchange sysadmins wanted a better interface than VBScript for automating tasks
. PowerShell will really be a big help to those many admins who have to use a half-baked workaround to administer multiple Exchange servers.
However, the Remote Wipe feature is a feature that the Blackberry Enterprise Servers have, as well as the ability to use SSL to communicate back with the home Exchange servers. If they change this version to allow user-installed CAs, then we’ll know that they’re really aiming for the government market.
In other words…they’re aiming squarely for RIM with these features.
OWA needs a revamp. There’s a major security hole which 2007 fixes, because MS thought it was too much work to backport to 2003. I certainly hope this version fixes it without introducing too many new bugs.
What they’re trying to push here to their enterprise customers is that they can put in these new Exchange servers on their enterprise licensing agreements, buy Windows Mobile products, and have them work with what they have instead of having to license Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Nevermind that BES allows full remote configurability besides Remote Wipe. Microsoft makes their money betting that people won’t use 90% of the features that the competition has, and that they’ve addressed the one or two most critical issues that C-level execs care about which the competition does have. Windows Mobile doesn’t allow for anything equivalent to a Group Policy Object for mobile devices, or remote configurability currently.
After that, the Voicemail interface to Exchange will be kludgy at best. People can already use their mobile phones to check email. The only thing I can think of here is that they want to use Exchange to also store voice mail and faxes, and get rid of the aftermarket products which expand Exchange to handle unified messaging, like Fax Sr.. Embrace and Extend at its finest here. I could also see a Voicemail to Text interface being brought out soon as well, so you can get transcriptions of your voice mail.
Expect their VOIP announcements to revolve around their own extensions to Exchange 2007 for voicemail, their own Asterisk-like product (or one from a partner of theirs) which interfaces with Exchange, and major changes on the Fax server front.
I’d also expect more news on the Anti-Virus front now that they’ve bought Sybari, and was surprised not to read more about this in the review. They’re also going to offer their own AV for Exchange, and cut out Symantec, Trend Micro, and the other vendors. Heck, I’m even expecting an integrated version of Windows Defender for this and their ISA Server product line.
Again, they’re doing right by their enterprise customers, and the admins who have to administer Exchange, but at the expense of their business partners as they slowly build their own products to replace their competitors. These products, while inferior in total features, address the main bullet points the C-level execs care about at a lower price.
Ballmer at his finest.
Thanks all for replying.
The MS kooks may have thought my comment was flamebait,
but, having a Reliable backup to Exchange is just REALITY.
I’ll check out: Exim and Zimbra.
I took a shot at upgrading an orgs Exchange to 2003 and what a nightmare that was. Somewhere I took a wrong turn and when they brought in a more experienced windows server guy he realized that the only way forward was to toast the whole Server 2003 OS install and start over. Since you couldn’t just uninstall Exchange and all it’s settings and start over without toasting the OS. You can’t pay me enough to work on Exchange. I suppose 2007 can’t be any worse, and probably better.
I can understand the frustration, but Exchange is a server product that probably doesn’t have a great installer. After all, you’re only supposed to install it once and then keep it running until the next upgrade. Why don’t you have disk images of your servers?
Microsoft, I believe, is counting on an uncertain PBX environment due to two factors:
1. The most-used OSs for PBX Voice Mail systems have been Win9X, WinNT, SCO UNIX, and OS/2. With the sunset of three of the four products there, and the fact that MS set up SCO for a fall, they are probably going to use the bad publicity generated by SCO to get in there to replace SCO’s PBX systems. Red Hat is aiming for that marketplace as well. They’ll even try and replace the old PBX systems from companies like Samsung, InterTel, and the rest.
They’re also going up against Cisco here, big time. However, their solution will be built around Exchange and AD. If you don’t believe me, go to the MSDN site and look at the Active Directory schema.
In particular, look at the User and Computer objects, as well as the Exchange 2007 reference on MSDN. There are hooks in AD for VOIP numbers. Windows Server 2003 R2 added an IP address field to the Computer class. Exchange 2007 adds hooks for faxing, PBX services (ms-Exch-UM-Max-greeting-Duration), and dial plans.
If that isn’t a plan for a PBX server with their AD schema changes, I don’t know what is.
2. Integration of existing PBX systems isn’t as uniform as it can be. Microsoft, for all their shortcomings, has really done with Active Directory what Novell should have done 15 years ago. They’ve made it easier to develop apps based around it. They’ve also provided the ability to reduce the total amount of administration needed for maintaining logins and account management.
They can pitch integration with the domain login, two-factor authentication, and e-mail at a lower cost than the competition if you go with an all-MS solution as opposed to using Cisco, Nortel, or other projects.
In other words….they’re gunning for the Blackberry/SmartPhone and PBX markets as a way of extending Outlook/Exchange. They’re also going to use this to try and hold off Asterisk and Linux for the time being, and also Red Hat (Red Hat is now used in some very high end phone systems), Cisco, Nortel, Avaya, and everyone else.
Watch for some smaller companies to announce phones compatible with Exchange 2007 as part of the product release
.