First of all merry Christmas everybody!

To make the Christmas days even better, I can inform you that the Exchange 2007 bits (both Standard and Enterprise edition) now are available on the MSDN.

In addition to having been heavily involved in the Exchange 2007 rapid deployment program and many other Exchange 2007 related events/meetings/sessions etc., it’s no longer a secret I, the last 10 months or so, have been working on an upcoming book on Exchange 2007. The book will be part of the popular How To Cheat series published by Syngress and will provide you with step by step instructions on how you configure and manage all the new exciting features in Exchange 2007 as well as properly transition from a legacy Exchange organization to Exchange 2007 (I will use an approach similar to the one I used in my Exchange 2003 book, which many of you liked).

Although Christmas is near the book won’t be available before some time in Q1 of 2007 (hopefully around February/Marts), so you still need a little patience, I just thought I would give you a little teaser though :)

Here’s a great flash demo of many of the new features included in OWA 2007.

Yes I’m not kidding here, those of you who aren’t participating in the Exchange 2007 TAP or RDP can download the evaluation bits of Exchange 2007 RTM here.

And no this is not some kind of Friday joke it’s true! If you don’t believe it you read Terry’s post here.

I’ve been running the escrow build, which is more or less identical to the final RTM, in my environment for a while now and I’m upgrading to the final RTM as I’m posting this.

Note
You cannot download the RTM bits just yet, but they should be available later today. So whwer did you get them from then? I hear some of you grumble. I got them via the Exchange 2007 Rapid Deployment Program (RDP).

Talk about being fast!

Leader in hosted Exchange launches Exchange 2007 as a hosted service for small and medium businesses

New York, December 6, 2006 – Intermedia.NET, the leader in Microsoft Exchange hosting, is the first company to offer a hosted Exchange 2007 service.  With a free copy of Microsoft Outlook 2003 included, businesses can now outsource their email and collaboration to the premiere provider of hosted Exchange and benefit from the most up-to-date technology available.

As the global leader in hosted Exchange services, Intermedia.NET will offer two options to our new clients: either sign up for hosted Exchange 2003 service, with a free upgrade to Exchange 2007 during the coming year; or sign up immediately for hosted Exchange 2007.

The hosted Exchange 2007 service from Intermedia.NET is based on the latest available Release Candidate of the software, which has been tested by Microsoft worldwide at many large corporations and is ready for production use by customers.

“By being the first Exchange host to offer Exchange 2007 to its customers, Intermedia.NET reaffirms its status as the industry leader, committed to offering the very best in hosted Exchange services,” said Intermedia.NET CEO Serguei Sofinski.

“Exchange 2007 is a tremendously exciting upgrade,” added Sofinski.  “Intermedia.NET is looking forward to huge demand for its advanced new features, as well as for our own fully-managed Exchange 2007 hosting service, which is an ideal way to adopt the technology without the expense and implementation time of an in-house deployment.”

Hosted Exchange 2007 customers will be able to download Microsoft Outlook 2003 free of charge, with a free download of Outlook 2007 as soon as it becomes available as a standalone product. Customers may also use Outlook Web Access 2007 and the exciting new mobility options offered by Exchange 2007 combined with Windows Mobile. Some advanced features, such as unified communications, will be added into the Intermedia.NET service during the coming year.

Customers will be able to choose between a variety of plans with up to 1 GB per mailbox, starting at $9.95 per mailbox per month. Current SAN-based Small Business and Enterprise plan customers will be upgraded for free during the course of 2007, and all customers signing up now for Exchange 2007 hosting can start benefiting from its new features immediately. 

Intermedia.NET has already begun a series of ongoing expansions to its control panel user interface in order to quickly equip its customers with all of the new Exchange features, as well as – in the near-term – adding Exchange 2007 integration with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Good Mobile and other optional services.

The new version of Exchange presents significant new features, which Intermedia.NET will roll out to customers on a continuous basis during the coming year:

• Unified messaging that goes beyond email to faxes and voicemail to the inbox – which can be accessed from a regular phone.
• Updated anti-spam and anti-virus filtering and scanning capabilities as well as new encryption features for internal and Internet-based messaging.
• Enhanced calendaring, out-of-office, resource booking and meeting scheduling capabilities.
• Mobile “search” of an entire Microsoft Exchange mailbox from any Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 device, giving complete access to their complete mailbox, not just the messages in a handheld’s limited local memory.
• Improved performance and scalability, thanks to clustered 64-bit hardware.
• Outlook Web Access (OWA) 2007 greatly enhanced, including the ability to set “out-of-office” messages from OWA, and to “transcode” a variety of document types – including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and PDF files – from their native format into HTML, so that users can be productive from any location, even if those applications are not installed.

Intermedia.NET is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and companies looking for hosting services know that Intermedia.NET will provide unparalleled uptime, the absolute best in 24×7 support, as well as technical knowledge of the highest level.

Intermedia.NET hosted Exchange plans start at $9.95 per month for each user. For further details on our hosted Exchange 2007 offering, please visit http://www.intermedia.net/exchange-2007.    

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About Intermedia.NET

Intermedia.NET is the worldwide leader in Exchange hosting and Web hosting for small and medium businesses. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we are committed to best-in-class 24×7 service. With three locations around the world, Intermedia.NET offers its growing customer base an outstanding technical team, guaranteed service levels, and ease of management through its unmatched HostPilot® Control Panel. Founded in 1995 and hosting Microsoft Exchange since 2000, its extremely reliable service and support have earned Intermedia.NET a reputation as one of the premiere provider of Exchange and Web hosting solutions. For more information, visit www.intermedia.net.

For more information, please contact:

Lisa Coleman

Marketing Manager

Intermedia.NET

646-519-8206

lcoleman@intermedia.net

London, UK, 5 December, 2006 – GFI, a leading provider of network security, content security and messaging software today releases GFI MailArchiver 4. GFI’s latest update to its email archiving solution is designed to bring affordable email archiving to any sized company; it allows archiving directly to an NTFS drive, removing the expense of purchasing a license for an MS SQL server. GFI MailArchiver also features new email retention policies and a ‘Saved Search’ function that allows individual users to save their search requests for repeated use. With GFI MailArchiver 4, businesses of all sizes are able to heavily reduce reliance on cumbersome PST files and ensure central archiving of all company email, also in-keeping with compliance and legal requirements.

According to Osterman Research, most regulations that include provisions for data retention do not specifically require email retention, but there are two important factors to consider: First, there is an increasing volume of corporate records that are sent through an email system. Second, email constitutes a written communication that carries the same formality and weight of a certified letter. With an increasing burden of compliance falling on businesses, and with high profile cases demonstrating a failure to comply, getting to grips with the way emails are identified and stored is of paramount importance. When it comes to implementing an email system there is a clear message: email forms part of record keeping systems and legislation dictates that records must be stored and email must be archived efficiently.

“Companies of all sizes and virtually every industry fall under government regulations that include data retention provisions,” said Michael Osterman, principal partner and analyst of Osterman Research. “Relying on backup tapes without an archiving system to manage the data can make recalling important documents very time consuming and costly for a company.”

GFI MailArchiver 4 is easier to install, and easier to use. New features also include the ability to search within various types of email attachments such as MS Word, MS Excel, PDF files, OpenOffice, WordPerfect and others. It also incorporates flexible email access control through Active Directory integration which allows configured users to access other users’ archived emails. For example, GFI MailArchiver can be configured to allow a departmental manager to access all his team’s email, for QoS and other reasons.

“GFI MailArchiver 4 provides a transparent installation process with no disruption to workflow. A separate MS SQL server license is not required either, making email archiving affordable to all companies.” said David Vella, GFI Product Manager. “With GFI MailArchiver you can eliminate dependency on cumbersome PST files, heavily reducing time spent by administrators backing up and fixing PST files.”

GFI MailArchiver 4 features a multi-lingual end-user interface and is available in German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Russian and Czech. The solution is available now via GFI’s global network of authorised resellers.

About GFI MailArchiver for Exchange
GFI MailArchiver for Exchange is an easy-to-use email archiving solution that enables all internal and external mail to be archived either into a single or multiple MS SQL Server databases or else directly to an NTFS disk. This allows administrators to provide users with easy, centralized access to past email via a web-based search interface. GFI MailArchiver for Exchange leverages the journaling feature of Exchange Server 2000/2003 and therefore provides unparalleled scalability and reliability at a competitive cost. More information about GFI MailArchiver and a trial version are available at http://www.gfi.com/mailarchiver/.

About GFI
GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. With award-winning technology, an aggressive pricing strategy and a strong focus on small-to-medium sized businesses, GFI is able to satisfy the need for business continuity and productivity encountered by organizations on a global scale. Founded in 1992, GFI has offices in Malta, London, Raleigh, Hong Kong, Adelaide, Hamburg and Cyprus which support more than 160,000 installations worldwide. GFI is a channel-focused company with over 10,000 partners throughout the world. GFI is also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. More information about GFI can be found at http://www.gfi.com.

With Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, deployment is easier than it’s ever been. Take a look at some of the major improvements to Exchange 2007 Setup:

• The Setup wizard has a new look! It is easy to use and effortlessly guides you through the installation.

• Setup is role-based, which means you can deploy individual server roles. Having the capability to select which server roles you want to deploy provides you with the flexibility to design an Exchange topology that is customized for your needs.

• By using the engine from the Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer Tool, all of the deployment prerequisites are automatically checked. Just like the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer Tool, the Setup wizard provides detailed information about any prerequisites that are not met so that you can make any necessary changes to you computer or your environment. Then you can either retry the prerequisite check or run the Setup wizard again.

• Before checking the prerequisites, Setup attempts to retrieve the latest version of the prereq.xml file from www.microsoft.com. This way, you will always have the most up-to-date prerequisite checks before you begin.

Even with all the great improvements to Exchange 2007 Setup, there are still a few things you should know before you install Exchange 2007. This article presents the top 10 issues that our very first Exchange 2007 customers have discussed, stumbled upon, and requested guidance about. 

Read the rest of the article over at the Exchange TechCenter Home.

Finally this document seems to have been released again, it disappeared quite quickly the first time it was published on Microsoft.com.

Overview
This topic illustrates how Microsoft met evolving business needs with the deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, such as reducing risks associated with spam, improving business agility, and lowering TCO. The 64-bit platform enables Microsoft IT to keep pace with ever-increasing performance expectations, raise mailbox quotas, lower storage costs, and eliminate tape backups to save additional costs.

Got an interesting question from a reader of the MSExchange.org newsletter today. After having read the November edition of the newsletter he was interested in hearing whether the license rules we know from Exchange 2003 cluster setups also apply to Exchange 2007 based clusters like Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Single Copy Clusters (SCC). And since I didn’t knew the answer to this question myself, I thought it was a good idea to bring it on to MS as it isn’t a good thing to make guesses when it comes to Microsoft licensing issues :)

I managed to get an answer (thanks Scott) and I can inform you that licensing rules haven’t changed when it comes to Exchange 2007 based clusters, which means you still have to buy an Exchange Enterprise license for the passive node(s) in the cluster too. The explanation being that the passive node(s), even though they are passive, still runs Exchange code in the background.