On September 14th of this year, David Espinoza, Senior Program Manager for Exchange Server Technology Adoption Program (TAP) sat down for a little Q&A with TAP participant and Senior Network Engineer Sara Windsor as she discussed the many benefits of being involved in the TAP program and what it’s like in the field.

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The release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) brings a wide variety of new features and functionality to Exchange 2007. The list of features we have added, which can be reviewed at What’s New in Exchange Server 2007 SP1, is quite impressive. There are new deployment options, new features and improvements for each server role, improved integration with other applications, such as Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, and even a new, third type of continuous replication.

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Brief Description

This poster highlights the architecture and feature set of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Overview

Aside from showing the high-level architecture, this poster highlights the feature set of Exchange Server 2007. Sections include:

• Management and Monitoring
• High Availability
• Client Access, Edge Transport, Hub Transport, Mailbox, and Unified Messaging server roles

Download it here.

Now that ILM 2007 (formerly known as MIIS) SP1 has been released, we finally have a GalSync agent that supports pure Exchange 2007 environments.

Read more and download ILM 2007 SP1 here.

London, UK, 1 October, 2007 – Software developer GFI Software has announced a promotion during Q4 with up to 50% off the list price of GFI MailEssentials, GFI MailSecurity, the GFI MailEssentials & GFI MailSecurity Suite and fax server solution GFI FAXmaker.

• GFI MailEssentials for Exchange/ SMTP is an anti-spam package that is easy to install, captures over 98% of spam and also eliminates the need to install and update anti-spam software on each desktop.
• GFI MailSecurity is an email anti-virus solution that uses multiple anti-virus engines to offer a higher level of protection to your network.
• The GFI MailEssentials & GFI MailSecurity Suite combines both products to offer a security solution that will protect networks again spam, malware, phishing sites and much more.
• GFI FAXmaker makes sending and receiving faxes an efficient, simple and cheaper process and allows users to receive and send faxes directly from their email client. It is the leading fax server for Exchange Server, Lotus and SMTP/POP3 servers.

Running until the end of December 2007, new customers purchasing these products will benefit from reductions ranging from 15% to 50% and as follows.

GFI MailEssentials                                               25% off

GFI MailSecurity                                                  50% off

GFI MailEssentials & GFI MailSecurity Suite        25% off

GFI FAXmaker                                                    15% off

This is an excellent opportunity to purchase GFI’s at reduced prices! More details of the offer can be found here: http://www.gfi.com/offers/q4offer.htm.

Finally my first paper for Microsoft IT has been published on the Microsoft IT Showcase site. It was hard but fun! BTW it would never had been completed without the help from Kay Unkroth and Pav Cherny from our technical writing team at Biblioso Corporation as well as all the Microsoft SME’s that put time into reviewing it.

Executive Summary

The Exchange Messaging team within Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) started the production rollout of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 at full scale in July 2006 using the beta 2 version of the product. For more than a year prior to this event, the Exchange Messaging team had deployed Exchange Server 2007 in the pre-release production environment to help the Exchange Server product group evaluate enterprise readiness.

The first server installation took place in the pre-release production environment in February 2005, more than 22 months before the product shipped. To put this time frame into perspective, Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server pre-release verification started three weeks before the release to manufacturing (RTM) date and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 pre-release verification period was only six months. This shows how strong the relationship between the Exchange Server Product group and the Exchange Messaging team has grown over recent years. In fact, the Exchange Server Product group does not ship product versions or service packs now until the Exchange Messaging team signs off on the enterprise readiness. To demonstrate the enterprise readiness of the new Exchange Server version to customers, the Exchange Messaging team committed to perform the transition of the entire corporate production mailbox environment prior to the official RTM date. The team only had five months to finish the deployment in a large enterprise messaging environment with demanding power users.

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Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2007 fixes the issues that are described in the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

940051 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/ 940051 /) The recipient information in an e-mail message incorrectly contains the character string “%40″ in the address instead of the at sign (@) in Exchange Server 2007

940058 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/ 940058 /) Non-English characters in the meeting description field are replaced by question marks when an Exchange Server 2007 user opens a meeting invitation that was sent by a Lotus Notes user

Also see relevant KB article here.

GFI Software today announced it is tracking a new method through which spammers send messages with MP3 attachments that contain the latest pump-and-dump stock scams.

London, UK, 18 October, 2007 – GFI Software, a leading developer of network security, content security and messaging software, today announced it is tracking a new method through which spammers send messages with MP3 attachments that contain the latest pump-and-dump stock scams.

The spam is a short, 30-second MP3 file recorded at low bit-rate with a synthetic female voice promoting a particular stock; the voice heavily distorted to avoid signature-based anti-spam approaches (click here to listen to an edited sample of MP3 spam).

Spammers are taking advantage of the fact that the MP3 format is one of the most common in use today and that most anti-spam solutions do not handle attachments very well because they do not actually analyze the attachment content.

“MP3 spam is a natural progression from PDF and Excel spam whereby spammers are exploiting a new file format to be able to send spam. This is their latest attempt to evade anti-spam filters. There is also a social engineering aspect to this tactic because people frequently share MP3 files,” David Vella, Director of Product Management, said.

To address the MP3 spam threat administrators need to deploy as many anti-spam techniques as possible, including Bayesian filtering, while at the same time maintaining a very low level of false positives. Additionally, administrators can block attachments or place restrictions on allowable sizes to weed out unwanted material.

GFI MailEssentials includes a second generation Bayesian filtering engine. This goes beyond the simple analysis of text but also examines the form and attributes of attachments. The benefit of spam detection via Bayesian filtering is that the technology automatically tunes itself to each customer-specific email profile, rather than relying on one ‘rule set’ for all customers like other rules-based anti-spam products do. With this second generation Bayesian filtering technology, GFI is at the forefront of anti-spam technology thus allowing the company to effectively deal with the constantly evolving spam techniques.

Users of GFI MailSecurity can also use the content filtering feature to filter out spam that is downloaded to the email client based on attachment file type or size.

For information on GFI’s anti-spam and anti-phishing solution, GFI MailEssentials, visit http://www.gfi.com/mes/. For information on GFI’s anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-malware solution, GFI MailSecurity, visit http://www.gfi.com/mailsecurity/.

About GFI MailEssentials
GFI MailEssentials offers anti-spam for Exchange server and other email servers and eliminates the need to install and update anti-spam software on each desktop. GFI MailEssentials offers a fast set-up and a high spam detection rate using Bayesian filtering and other methods. With very low false positives, GFI MailEssentials will eliminate over 98% of the spam from your network as well as detect and block phishing emails and hard to catch image-spam through a Botnet/Zombie check. GFI MailEssentials also adds email management tools to your mail server: disclaimers, mail monitoring, Internet mail reporting, list server, server-based auto replies and POP3 downloading.

November MMMUG meeting.will be held in London at the MS offices at Cardinals Place near Victoria. This month Doug Gowans from MCS and I will be leading the session. We will be discussing what steps must be undertaken after installing Exchange to get to a fully serviceable install. We will then show how this can be automated from the command line.

The meeting will be held on Wednesday 28th November.

The meeting will be a mixture of PowerPoint and Discussions so there will be plenty of time to run through any questions.

To sign up and for more information please visit: http://www.mmmug.co.uk/forums/thread/1651.aspx

Steve Justice has recorded a new video series that walks through the process using new versions of the DST tools. There is also a video talking about August 2007 Windows Cumulative Time Zone Update.

Read more at source…