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4/14/2009

Exchange Server 2010 Reaches Public Beta

I can't believe it is finally time for me to openly (well sort of) announce and discuss the Exchange Server 2010 product which has now gone into its first public Beta as of today (04/14/2009). You can now download the public beta at this site! So, let's get down to a few of the features coming in Exchange 2010 (at least those I can opening discuss so far J ).

Exchange 2010 should be in full release mode by the end of the year (according to this PCWorld article)
Rumors have also been floating around the Internet recently that the forthcoming Office 14 (most likely will be Office 2010) will not ship until sometime in calendar year 2010.
- Both product names would seem to be accurate since Microsoft typically names its products after the fiscal year in which they ship, not the calendar year. Microsoft begins its fiscal year each July 1^st.
Microsoft's stated direction for new server products is to release both an On-Promise server solution as well as a hosted service based solution (currently known as BPOS).
It appears that for those existing BPOS customers, they will be given the option of upgrading to the new Exchange 2010 capabilities online starting in the first half of 2010.
When Exchange 2010 ships, it is expected that organizations will be able to support both an On-Premise and a Service or hosted solution seamlessly within the same company. This provides many companies I have worked with in the past the ability to support year round employees "On-Premise" and yet offer a Hosted solution for temporary or seasonal workers. This could very well benefit organizations that have large seasonal work forces that didn't or couldn't move to Exchange because of the cost involved in ramping up servers for the seasonal workers. It will be interesting to see the eventual licensing model that Microsoft chooses to use for this…

With this new version of Exchange, there are a large number of significant changes to the product that I will be discussing in some detail over the next few weeks/months. For now, I will focus on one new feature that enables organizations to create and easily support a more granular administration model. With Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft published White Papers such as Configuring Permissions in Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange 2007 Permissions: Frequently Asked Questions. With Exchange 2010, although no White Papers are yet available, the permission model is much simpler and is based upon the Roles (not the Exchange permission set as it has been in all previous versions of Exchange). For example, an organization might need to grant specific permissions to search and access specific mailboxes if they are a Compliance Officer or Human Resources Manager in the company (according to Julia White, director of the Exchange product management team). What took a great deal of effort in Exchange 2007 and often with only limited success will be done in Exchange 2010 with relative ease.

I am very excited about this Exchange version, more so than I remember being about any other version in the history of Exchange. And yes, for those of you who don't know me, I have been working with and implementing Exchange since the Early Adopter program for Exchange 4.0 (the very first version) and also worked with MS Mail, CC:Mail, and others before that. The Exchange Product Group has come a long way with this product and has really listened to customers with regard to some of the key pain points they experienced in earlier versions of Exchange. The Product Group, in my opinion, has worked hard to resolve these pain points in Exchange 2010, often in very creative ways that I think will "Just work".

In future posts, I will be covering these topics related to Exchange 2010:

Storage goals and design changes
OWA Feature Updates
Management and Permission Changes for users and administrators
Compliance with Exchange 2010
High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Unified Messaging Improvements
Migration to Exchange 2010
Developer API Changes

Stay tuned…

Posted at 11:38 PM by Cooper, Gary | Category: Exchange 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

4/1/2009

Exchange 14 Web Services Preview

Ok, so Microsoft finally has release some information I have been dying to talk about with respect to Exchange 14. Microsoft is preparing to release with Exchange 14 a managed API for Exchange Web Services that can be utilized by developers to access Exchange data within mailboxes such as folders, email, calendar, contacts, etc… The Web Services approach is nothing new as it existed in Exchange Server 2007, but most applications written for Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 still used WebDav. Exchange Web Services is the new WebDav. There is already a sample Vista Gadget available today to demonstrate this functionality.

Go here to get more information on Exchange 14 Web Services and the announcement

Here is the PDC2008 presentation on Exchange Web Services Managed API

Go here to read more about the Managed Web Services API from MSDN.

Posted at 10:33 AM by Cooper, Gary | Category: Exchange 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/26/2009

Microsoft makes available Outlook 2007 Pre-SP2 Performance update

Microsoft has released (in February of this year) a cumulative update for Office that is a pre-release of fixes due in Service Pack 2. I have been running this for a few weeks now and the biggest changes in this update are these:

Outlook Improvements

Improved responsiveness (reduced I/O disk usage and improved UI response time)
Decreased Outlook startup time
GREATLY improved exit/shutdown time (this one is HUGE since it resolves the issue with Outlook not really shutting down when you ask it to).
Improved performance for folder and view changes
General reliability of calendar updates especially in delegate manager scenarios

General Improvements

Reduced Data File Checks (this is noticed when you see the message "The data file <file name> was not closed properly…")
Improved search reliability
Fewer duplicate RSS items
General security improvements

A full list of improvements and fixes included in this update are available at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968009/

The update is available on request from this site: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=961752

Posted at 8:29 AM by Cooper, Gary | Category: Exchange 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/25/2009

Using PowerShell to Provision Active Directory Users

In the last two issues of TechNet Magazine, Don Jones of Concentrated Technology, has written about scripting (and therefore automating) the creating of users accounts within Active Directory. He does use the Quest Active Roles PowerShell cmdlets to accomplish his goal, so if you don't have that, some of the details might not work for you as described. However, he does go into good detail on some basics of PowerShell scripting such as using Process blocks, and imputing data into the pipe by way of a csv file. He also includes video demonstrating the techniques. So far, 2 of the 4 parts to this story have been published, so keep watching here or on the TechNet Magazine site for the last 2 parts. All in all, it is worth the read.

Source: Automating User Provisioning, Part 1 and Automating User Provisioning, Part 2

Posted at 8:57 AM by Cooper, Gary | Category: Exchange 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

3/12/2009

OCS 2007 – Why no UDP???

I ran into this article which I found very interesting, especially the comments posted by others and the Microsoft response. I am hearing a good deal of customers telling me that they don't want to use OCS enterprise voice because it isn't following industry standards, to which we usually discuss why OCS doesn't use UDP or G.711. I try to explain the logic in needing larger packets with G.711 and a fixed bit rate, or the required use of QOS for everyone else's products due to both G.711 and UDP. I am glad now that I can point to this article, which although still leaves some questions, does answer some on UDP at least. The net-net of this to me is "Because they wanted to use TLS for the entire set of packets and that required TCP".

Article beings with…

Generically, SIP can use (at least) 3 types of transport. Office Communications Server supports TCP and TLS, with the latter being the default (actually, TLS runs on TCP).

Various interactions with some partners and customers of late of have posed the question: "Why doesn't OCS support SIP over UDP?" Their belief is that UDP is the 'lowest common denominator' SIP transport that is supported by "everyone" and that, by not supporting it, OCS is out of step with the mainstream of SIP implementation and interoperability.

Let's evaluate that proposition on its merits.

Why doesn't OCS support UDP?

There are three issues with UDP:

1) It is not encrypted, so you can't ensure end to end security of SIP messages. There is no shortage of opinions on the security, or the lack thereof, of SIP (e.g. Cert® Advisory, ). As a text based protocol that is human readable (if 'readable' is the right word…it is not exactly prose…) there are privacy/security issues of sending SIP 'in clear'. Furthermore, UDP allows for easier spoofing of packets since connection state doesn't need to be maintained (remember Slammer?....UDP). This is why OCS customers are strongly recommended to accept TLS over TCP as the default SIP transport within the OCS network….

Continue at the source: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/05/23/196.aspx

Posted at 10:00 AM by Cooper, Gary | Category: OCS 2007 R2 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/27/2009

Microsoft Certified Master: Exchange 2007

Well, I finally got the time and the nerve to take the updated Exchange 2007 Master Qualification Lab. I can say it was "real" and "not altogether fun", so I guess I can say it was Not Real Fun. To be serious, it was a lot of work for me to exercise this brain of mine, however it does prove what you've got when it comes to understanding the Exchange product and what it takes to implement and troubleshoot it in a real life environment. I just thank god I passed it the first time. Now on to E14 and its testing… YEAH!!!

MCM:Exchange2007

Posted at 6:41 PM by Cooper, Gary | Category: Exchange 2007 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

2/20/2009

BlackHat Presenter shows how he defeats SSL Encryption

So here is a guy (Maxie Marlinspike) who gave a talk on how he can get around SSL based encryption. It isn't so much of a hack or security breach than a social engineering trick fooling users into thinking they are using a secure site for say their bank or company email, etc… and with a man in the middle attack, he grabbed over 300 login credentials in 24 hours. A key comment he makes is that many users are not required to type the URL as https:// so they don't pay much attention to the site they get directed to or the certificate used if they do get directed to a site that they think is secure because they see a lock somewhere on the page. He also points out poor web pages that you initially reach via http:// and you trust that when you click the login button (that presents no URL when hovering over it), that it will take you to a HTTPS:// page.

Makes me wonder if we are doing users justice when we publish websites for OWA, SharePoint, etc… to just use redirection for the secured part of the site. We normally do this so users won't have to type in the "s" in the URL string. Maybe that isn't such a good practice.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/vulnerabilities/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=214501930&cid=nl_IWK_daily_H

The original slide deck of the presentation can be found at: https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-09/Marlinspike/BlackHat-DC-09-Marlinspike-Defeating-SSL.pdf

Posted at 8:10 AM by Cooper, Gary | Category: Security | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)