TECH

Went to the Microsoft Roadshow in Birmingham yesterday, there was some good stuff... and some not so good. By far the most interesting for me was the Exchange 12 / 2007 presentation. Its now been called Exchange 2007.. no surprises there.. One of the Microsoft’s Technical Evangelists, Eileen Brown presented some of the new features of the product, well as much as was in it to date or were allowed to say at this stage.

The presentation was good, she managed to cram a lot of interesting stuff into the hour slot and even some live demos. It looked as if she was working on a newer release than what I had originally looked at as web access worked for a start and the management console looked a lot more finished.

Some interesting things I picked up... Microsoft are now using it, always a winner.. people are wary of new software but when you have a company as big as Microsoft running on it adds a lot of weight to the argument... also that’s a lot of people putting the product through its paces so most of the biggies are going to be ironed out even before it gets to beta2.

The front end server stats that Eileen quoted were pretty impressive.. i forget the numbers now.. should of wrote them down but it was something like 120,000 users coming in through 3 front end servers :| ... NICE...

Eileen did push 64 bit servers, now.. this is something that I have been telling my customers for last 6 months now.. if your are replacing your exchange hardware go 64 bit now so you are ready for the next version.. but.. what she did add that I hadn’t considered was the fact that there will also be big advantages in deploying 64bit servers for AD as well.

Continuous replication will be available in both single and clustered installations. I need to get some more detail on this but it basically sounds like its the ability to maintain a backup copy of the database that is continuously updated from the transaction logs. Either by having a copy on some other disk on the local machine or having a copy on another exchange server. The ins and outs of it I still need to work out but at least I know that the option is there now so I can try and find some more info..

oo yea.. MONAD.. the command line tool that lets you do everything that in Exchange has been renamed and is now called Windows Power Shell.

To round off the presentation Eileen did a demo of the Unified Messaging part of Exchange. This was good to see as its a completely new feature set and one that I would never be able to look at myself in a test lab. It worked very well and I can see it definitely being of use for road warriors, people in cars that need to pick up their email / calendar whilst mobile.. although.. I was thinking maybe a windows mobile version may be possible using something like voice command. If you have a mobile device that already has all the email / calendar stuff on it and has a continuous connection to Exchange with the new SP2 stuff then why do you need to make a phone call back to the Exchange server? why cant the client device handle it. I guess its just for a generic method for people that don’t have smartphones.. also the demo showed that the virtual assistant on the new Exchange 2007 demo was a bit more intelligent than the smartphone voice command.. Hopefully she can deal with car noise better as well.
Eileen showed examples of connecting to an inbox and having the virtual assistant read emails and calendars and then some voice activated manipulation so like accepting calendar requests, clearing calendars, letting people know you would be late for a meeting etc.. all good stuff

Eileen briefly showed the next version of Outlook Web Access which did seem even closer to Outlook than the 2003 version but.. there was a lot of whole screen refreshing going on, which is hopefully just a feature of the early beta. I didn’t see if you could finally manage someone elses mailbox yet using it.