Elan Shudnow’s Blog

For those who are interested in OCS, there are two new blogs that have just been created:

Office Communications Server Team Blog:
http://communicationsserverteam.com/default.aspx

Office Communicator Team Blog:
http://communicatorteam.com/default.aspx

Elan Shudnow :: Aug.28.2007 :: Microsoft, OCS :: 1 Comment »

This isn’t anything really new, but something I figured I would post. Microsoft has been making products readily available for evaluation purposes on VHD files for some time now. VHD files are the virtualization files for Virtual Server and Virtual PC. If you are looking to test drive Exchange, ISA, Office, Vista, Server 2008, or some other Microsoft product, I would visit the following URL:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/try/vhd/default.mspx

Elan Shudnow :: Aug.14.2007 :: Exchange, ISA, Microsoft, OCS :: No Comments »

REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 13, 2007 —Microsoft Corp. today announced Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and opened a technology preview for the software. Exchange Server 2007 SP1 features enhancements such as support for Windows Server^® 2008, enhanced integration with Microsoft^® Office Communications Server 2007, and improved mobile device management and advanced security technology.

Release Notes are located here.

SCR ready for production use:

• Extends the existing continuous replication features and enables new data availability scenarios
• Supports multiple targets per storage group
• SCR enables a separation of high availability (comprised of service and data availability) and site resilience
• SCR can be combined with CCR to replicate storage groups locally in a primary datacenter (using CCR for high availability) and remotely in a secondary or backup datacenter (using SCR for site resilience)

OWA:

• New OWA themes (X-Box, Zune)
• Supporting digital signatures with certificate that do not have email address in them for S/MIME

S/Mime features which were not complete in Beta 1:

• HTML filtering (now S/MIME message reading and editing is full fidelity)
• OWA Printing
• Admin Settings
• Both the new task and the updated MOM pack have been checked into the Beta 2 branch.
• Integration with anti-junk/phishing mail features
• Many bug fixes (in all features, not just S/MIME)
• Exchange Web Services HTTP Proxy and new Web Services ID’s.

New EMC features:

• Full Access permission management for mailboxes and mail-enabled public folders
• Preview of AL/EAP/DL with custom filter
• More ActiveSync policy settings

Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange UM integration:

• Support for additional types of UM dial plans
• Additional logic for resolving internal calling numbers
• Notification of forwarding when voice messages are left and the destination uses call forwarding
• Support for recording high-fidelity voice messages
• “Play on Phone” calls cannot be automatically forwarded when they are played on Communicator 2007
• Outlook Voice Access can be accessed from Communicator 2007 without requiring the user to enter a PIN
• Communicator 2007 clients can associate subjects and priorities with voice messages
• Support for media streams to traverse firewalls
• Integration of “missed call” notification e-mail messages with Communicator 2007

Other:

• Both the new task and the updated MOM pack have been checked into the Beta 2 branch
• Inter-Site Message Size Restrictions feature enable
• Test-ReplicationHealth is a new task that MOM pack uses to monitor HA replication
• MRM now supports policies on the message type “e-mail” in addition to other types of items (calendar, notes, etc)

Additional information:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/aug07/08-13Exchange2007NewPR.mspx
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/08/14/446656.aspx
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/06/28/445538.aspx#445539
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939531

Elan Shudnow :: Aug.14.2007 :: Exchange, Microsoft, OCS, Server 2008 :: 1 Comment »

Microsoft has many e-Learning courses available on their website which you can locate here. Microsoft will occassionally provide some of these e-Learning courses for free for a limited amount of time. Available now, for free, is an Introduction to Unified Messaging course which you can participate in here. There are also several Office Communication Server 2007 courses which you can find here, here, here, and here.

Elan Shudnow :: Aug.10.2007 :: Exchange, Microsoft, OCS, Training :: No Comments »