Exchange E12 Improvements

Bink is reporting about the news on Exchange from TechEd Europe, looks like they are getting a much better preview of whats going on in E12 than we got at US TechEd.

Also glad to see some discussion on Public Folders. Exchange team had hoped to drop the public folders and effectively force the people into SharePoint, something I would love to see not just because Public Folders are a nightmare to manage and SharePoint uses SQL as storage, but because its a wonderful technology that falls by the wayside because its too difficult for someone to open up a web browser! Perhaps they’ll have some time left in E12 to integrate access to SharePoint in the main icon set under Journals (yet another thing absolutely nobody uses).

Exchange E12 Preview
Server-side search
Admin can choose Exchange server roles, like edge server, OWA, backend.
AutoDiscovery service to configure Outlook and devices to connect to Exchange
Scriptable command line interface
Native 64-bit Support (direct when it is relased)
Ability to connect the Exchane 12 server to a PBX, users can receive voicemail and faxes in their mailbox and better, users can phone to their mailbox and have email read to them or cancel appointments and send the meeting attentdees a voicemessage.

Serverside search
* Access documents form Sharpoint sites

OWA12: Shared SharePoint documents from OWA
* Efficient, reliable meeting scheduling
* Browse contacts, language setting

Message hygiene
* Edge Server Protection
* Anti-virus & Anti-spam extensibility

Secure messaging
* Auto-establish secure B2B email
* Secure content sharing over email

Enterprise policy enforcement
* Mail flow policies: archival, encryption, routing
* Storage policies: retention, archival, deletion
* Rich auditing and search

Public folder enhancements:

* There is a new wizard added in SP2, the PB settings wizard, making life easier assigining permissions and more to folders.
* A new option at organisation level to stop public folder replication at once, so the PF admin can solve replica issues more easily.
* Folder deletion logging

Other enhancements

* Exchange Standard Edition will have a major sotarge .limit increase from 16G to 75Gigs! (about time)
* Improved cached mode performance
* 30% size reduction of Offline Address Book (OAB)
* Reduced causes for full OAB download
* OAB indexing moved to the client
* Connection controls and migration
* Cached mode connection enforcement
* Supported GroupWise 6.x connector/migration tools
* Iberian & Brazilian Portuguese OWA spell check