Extending Exchange for Mobility - How to deliver secure, high performance, mobile messaging is a free virtual event taking place this Thursday, December 4th.

Seminar Overview:
TITLE: Extending Exchange for Mobility: How to deliver secure, high performance, mobile messaging
WHEN: Thursday, December 4th from 10:00 am - 3:30 pm EST
SPEAKERS: Exchange MVPs - Richard Luckett, President of SYSTMS of NY, Inc. and Lee Benjamin of ExchangeGuy Consulting - as well as Harold Wong, Senior Technology Specialist at Microsoft

Session Descriptions:

• Session 1: Mobile Device Security and Management
  Lee Benjamin will explain how to safely manage mobile devices as an extension of your corporate Exchange Server system. You’ll learn how to accommodate flexibility and rich user capabilities without introducing security vulnerabilities or lots of administrative headaches.
• Session 2: Security Considerations for Unified Communications
  Richard Luckett will review security vulnerabilities and remedies that arise from the adoption of Unified Communications. He will also address security topics specific to Microsoft Office Communications Server as well as compliance, client security, and voice security.
• Session 3: Using Exchange Server 2007 for Voicemail
  Harold Wong will provide best practices for developing a plan to deploy Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging for your organization.

The latest Unified Communications technical rollup covers the following topics:

• News
• Downloads
• Events/Webcasts
• Workshops/Soundbytes
• New KB’s

As usual, this information is posted every month at the Technical Rollup blog.

Configuring Microsoft Exchange for Fast Recovery is a free e-book available from Realtime Publishers.

Microsoft Exchange is the premiere authority for email in today’s global marketplace. With the impact email has on the workplace and corporate communications, along with the advent of Exchange Server 2007, maintaining an optimal environment is vital.  This includes building a resilient environment that can recover from unexpected interruptions.

The Essentials Series: Configuring Microsoft Exchange for Fast Recovery will provide you with the tools for configuring hardware backup and restoration strategies to help return Exchange to full function with minimal downtime.

Article 1: Addressing Hardware Needs and Determining Recovery Point Objectives
In the first article of this series, you will learn how to build an Exchange environment that is designed to keep working and enhance performance. You will also learn about the role of Recovery Point Objectives in achieving fast recovery.

Article 2: Backup Methods Available for Exchange
To be sure you have the ability to perform fast recoveries in Exchange Server, you need to be sure you have a good method of backup. The backup must be fast, complete, and, of course, recoverable. This article looks at different backup methodologies and considers some of the new features in Exchange 2007 that make fast recovery possible. It also covers considerations for backing up the various server roles and domain controllers. Finally, this second article finishes up with backup best practices.

Article 3: Exchange Recovery Recommendations
Failure is not an option, or so we like to think! Failure in an organization is not a question of if but when. When it does occur it is important to be able to recover quickly. In this last article we will look at recommendations for achieving these goals and how to improve RPO and RTO to meet or exceed the Service Level agreements for your organization.

While I was browsing VMware Technical Resources, I noticed there are a couple of interesting documents:

• Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure - Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure offers many advantages, including higher availability,simplified recovery, and more efficient use of resources. This paper discusses best practices for running Exchange 2003 in a VMware Infrastructure environment, in the areas of servers, virtual machines, storage, and implementation. In addition, a case study shows an example architecture, and the Appendix provides some sample metrics for Exchange performance.
• Data Protection Options for Exchange - More and more customers are deploying their mission critical applications, prominently Exchange, on VMware Infrastructure platform. This paper describes various options that customers have in protecting Exchange installation against data loss. The paper also summarizes the merits of each of the options.

Microsoft released recently the new Exchange Online Infrastructure Planning and Design guide.

Brief Description
The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario

Overview
Infrastructure Planning and Design guides share a common structure, including:

• Definition of the technical decision flow through the planning process.
• Listing of decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
• Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
• Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

These guides complement product documentation by focusing on infrastructure design options.
Each guide leads the reader through critical infrastructure design decisions, in the appropriate order, evaluating the available options for each decision against its impact on critical characteristics of the infrastructure. The IPD Series highlights when service and infrastructure goals should be validated with the organization and provides additional questions that should be asked of service stakeholders and decision makers.
IPD consists of the following downloadable packages:

• New! Exchange Online—Evaluating Software-plus-Services
• New! Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP1 with R2
• New! Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5
• Windows Server 2008 File Services
• Windows Server 2008 Print Services
• Infrastructure Planning and Design Series Introduction
• Internet Information Services 7.0
• Selecting the Right NAP Architecture
• Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology
• System Center Operations Manager 2007
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
• Windows Deployment Services
• Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services
• Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
• Windows Server Virtualization (for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1)

The guides are available as individual downloads or as a single all-in-one package.

The EMC site as a nice video about Replication Options for Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

“Find out about replication options for Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint, and SQL Server with Brian Henderson of EMC’s Center for Excellence. Learn about application-based solutions like CCR for Exchange and database mirroring for SQL, network solutions with EMC RecoverPoint, and zero data-loss cluster-enabled solutions with a storage area network (SAN) infrastructure.“

While reading the mother of all blogs, You Had Me At EHLO, I noticed that the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.4 Update is available to download and that it fixes an Entourage calendar issue (for those who don’t know what Entourage is, think of it as the Outlook for Mac).

“This update fixes a calendar issue in versions of Microsoft Entourage that were updated with the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update. The issue prevents Exchange accounts in Entourage from sending meeting invitations and responses. This issue can occur when an Entourage identity is configured with more than one mail account. We strongly recommend that all Entourage users who installed Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update install this update.“

Applies to: Office 2008, Office 2008 Home and Student Edition, Office 2008 Special Media Edition, Word 2008, Excel 2008, PowerPoint 2008, Entourage 2008.

Now that Windows Essential Business Server was officially launched, you may be interested in knowing how to migrate Exchange Server to this new server platform. If you do, go get Migrating Microsoft Exchange Server to Windows Essential Business Server (v1.4).

Overview
This document explains how to migrate existing mailboxes, offline address book generation processes, and public folder replicas to the Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) Messaging Server. If your environment already includes Exchange Server, you must still migrate it to take full advantage of the integrated security and monitoring features in Windows EBS. Your existing servers will continue to function in the Exchange Server organization, but certain roles and features must be handled by Windows EBS.

Related Documents:

• Windows Essential Business Server Getting Started Guide - Windows Essential Business Server provides an integrated server and management system for midsize organizations. This document summarizes the installation and configuration of Windows Essential Business Server in a production environment.
• Windows Essential Business Server Installation Guide - Windows Essential Business Server provides an integrated server and management system for midsize networks. This document explains how to install Windows Essential Business Server in a production environment. This guide describes the procedures that you follow in the Windows Essential Business Server Installation Wizard.

Service Pack 1 for Data Protection Manager 2007 is scheduled to be released in December. But for all of you eager to know the new features, there will be a series of videos/podcasts available at the Technet Edge site, each describing a new feature.

The first one is already available:

• Data Protection Manager with Jason Buffington - This week at IT Forum the DPM team is announcing DPM SP1, which includes a bunch of new features that improve the functionality in DPM.  Jason Buffington dropped by the studio to tell us a little more about what we can expect to see in the new release.
  This video kicks off a whole series of DPM videos that Jason will be providing us with highlighting each of the new features - keep an eye out for them here on Edge!

The Pro-Exchange site has also lots of information about protecting Exchange Server with DPM 2007. After their last event, Ilse wrote some interesting stuff about DPM and she also provided a link to a cool Chopstick video about item recovery:

• Pro-Exchange event was great: you rock!

Ilse, an Exchange MVP and winner of last year’s Speaker Idol at EMEA TechEd IT Forum, presented 2 sessions on this year’s TechEd. She will soon post the slide decks from her presentations.

Microsoft has released updated Help (HxS) files for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. This update contains the latest revisions and additions to Office Outlook Help and to Office Outlook Developer Help.

Brief Description
This update installs the latest assistance content for the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Help file and the Office Outlook 2007 Developer Help file.

Overview
This download replaces the Help (.HxS) files on your computer for Office Outlook 2007. The download contains the latest revisions and additions to content in those Help files.
By default, outlookhelp.msp automatically replaces the current OUTLOOK.DEV.HXS and OUTLOOK.HXS file in the \Program Files\Office12\1033 directory on the drive where you installed the 2007 Office System. If you installed the 2007 Office System in a different directory, you can locate the files in the \1033 directory, a subdirectory of the \Program Files\Office12 folder.

Instructions
To install this download:

1. Download the outlookhelp-en-us.exe file by clicking the Download button at the bottom of this page.
2. In the dialog box that appears, click Save, and then specify a location on your hard disk for the download file.
   You should download this file if you have access to your original product CD-ROM. You might need to provide the original Office installation source during installation if you previously updated your product.
3. Quit any Office 2007 programs that you are running.
4. In Windows Explorer, double-click the outlookhelp-en-us.exe file that you saved to your hard disk. Double-click the extracted outlookhelp.msp and then follow the instructions on the screen to install the files.
   For more information, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article KB957246, Description of Updates for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Help: November 11, 2008