We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest site VirtualizationAdmin.com - a site completely dedicated to Virtualization related topics such as desktop virtualization (VDI), hypervisors, storage virtualization, and application virtualization.

Enjoy!

You can get it here.

Microsoft® Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 Service Pack (SP) 1 will be available for your installation pleasure this summer!

This Service Pack introduces new features and improved functionality for ISA Server 2006 Enterprise and Standard Editions. The new features focus primarily on enhanced troubleshooting mechanisms designed to help you identify and resolve ISA Server configuration issues.   Also included in this package are the updates we’ve promised for so long, such as SAN certificate support.

Read more here.

With the introduction of Exchange Web Services in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, we began to invest in a broadly capable developer interface.  Exchange Web Services is the first Exchange API to expose rich Microsoft Office Outlook interoperability to any application in a strongly-typed, Internet accessible (HTTP-based) programming model.  Because the Exchange Web Services interfaces are based on the HTTP, XML, SOAP, and WSDL open standards, developers are free to use any platform they choose for Exchange development and application deployment.  Another great advantage of the open standards-based architecture of EWS is that there are many tools on various platforms available for creating programmatic interfaces for SOAP Web services, which makes developing against Exchange much easier than formatting and processing raw XML.  In the next version of Exchange, we will continue to invest in Web services by delivering new capabilities that provide a more efficient and optimized interface for Exchange and UC developers.

Continue here.

-Solution that Fully Synchronizes Microsoft^® Outlook^® and Gmail now being tested in early beta release-

San Mateo, Calif.—May 15, 2008—Cemaphore Systems has launched the first phase in its beta program for MailShadow® for Google Apps (MailShadowG) this week. MailShadowG provides real time synchronization between Outlook/Exchange email, calendars and contacts, and Gmail™. In all, more than 2000 respondents have registered to participate in the beta1 program, far exceeding the company’s expectations, with new participants registering each day.

As anticipated, Cemaphore has issued the initial beta1 release to a field of several hundred participants. Development is track for the public beta2 launch to happen next month. Cemaphore continues to invite interested users to register for that program.

As has been widely reported in industry press, MailShadowG is the first web services—based email continuity and disaster recovery solution to fully utilize the robust Google Apps cloud-based services. MailShadowG provides e-mail users with continuity, content management, and portability of their rich email.  MailShadow’s transaction-based architecture synchronizes all content bi-directionally in real-time.  Content is protected and can be viewed transparently from Outlook or via Google’s web interfaces for Gmail, contacts and Google Calendar™.

“It is clear that our focus on ‘Continuity in the Cloud’ is resonating strongly,” said Tyrone Pike, Cemaphore President and CEO.  “The ability to deliver the highest level of e-mail continuity in the cloud with zero infrastructure will have a major impact on the way that the entire market manages and archives e-mail content in the future. We see this having an impact on SMBs, consumers and even large enterprises, as validated by the types of customers who are responding to our beta request. We are seeing strong interest from all of these sectors.”

Company officials again confirmed that following this summer’s launch of MailShadowG for Gmail customers, Cemaphore is committed to providing additional web services—based MailShadow solutions for other key Email Service Providers as well.

About Cemaphore Systems, Inc.
Cemaphore Systems delivers unprecedented email continuity, disaster recovery and content management for enterprises that demand greater uptime for their email systems. Able to synchronize mail, calendars and contacts from disparate systems, Cemaphore’s flagship product, MailShadow, ensures the availability, integrity and reliability of email. A companion product, GeoShadow™, indexes and archives unstructured email content, enabling instant retrieval of email content and attachments from mobile devices. Cemaphore’s new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering lets companies link Microsoft Outlook to external email service providers like Google, eliminating the need for costly infrastructure. Global enterprises trust Cemaphore to keep business-critical systems running.

For additional information, please call (650) 227-5400 or visit the company’s Web site at www.cemaphore.com.

Google, Google Apps, Gmail and Google Calendar are trademarks of Google Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. NASDAQ: GOOG

Yesterday we finally implemented Advanced search features on MSExchange.org.

If you take a look at the search box at the top right of each page you will see that there is an advanced search link. Once you click on that you can search any section, for any keyword, and in any section of an article or tip. You can also search within the forums, within the white paper sections, etc. Everything is integrated.

You can also display results based on relevance, date, or title. This is something that many of you have been asking for a long time!

This new white paper is still hot and an absolutely “must read”.

Finally RU2 for Exchange 2007 SP1 has been released.

Download it here and read the associated KB article here.

Several of the authors here on MSExchange.org are as you already know also Exchange MVPs. MVPs are invited to a yearly MVP summit in Seattle, Redmond.

Below you see a picture of the MSExchange.org authors who attended this years MVP summit. From the left: Shaji Firoz, Nathan Winters, Anderson Patricio, Rui Silva and finally Neil Hobson.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to attend the summit this year

This is one great technical white paper written by my fellow buddy and colleague Kay Unkroth, so it includes of lot of nice details just like his previous papers for Microsoft IT Showcase.

Executive Summary

More than 18 months after the first Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 deployment in the corporate messaging environment and more than 12 months after completing the full production rollout across the entire company, the Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) group is able to report significant benefits such as:

• Messaging service levels exceeding high-availability targets of 99.99 percent.
• Cost reductions in excess of $10 million per year.
• Increased mailbox quotas by up to a factor of 10.
• Consolidation of the initial Exchange Server 2007 base by nearly a factor of two.

Microsoft IT was able to achieve these results by taking full advantage of new storage features and input/output (I/O) improvements in Exchange Server 2007, the latest advancements in 64-bit processor technology, and direct-attached storage (DAS)–based storage solutions.

One key strategy that accounts for more than $5 million in annual cost savings involved eliminating the need for backups to tape by relying on new high-availability features in Exchange Server 2007 such as cluster continuous replication (CCR) as the first level of protection, and Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 as the second level of protection. Microsoft IT is not required to keep data on tape for archiving or other purposes. Moreover, according to an internal study conducted in 2006, Microsoft IT realized a 74 percent reduction of storage costs per gigabyte by replacing Storage Area Network (SAN) technology with DAS technology in the Mailbox server design. CCR enabled Microsoft IT to switch from SAN to DAS, which improved Microsoft IT’s ability to support employee productivity by means of large mailboxes with quotas between 500 megabytes (MB) and 2 gigabytes (GB).

Microsoft IT pursued another key strategy that focused on driving down total cost of ownership (TCO) through server consolidation. Microsoft IT has already reduced the initial Mailbox server base in the corporate messaging environment by more than 45 percent, from 62 servers (124 cluster nodes) to 34 Mailbox servers (68 cluster nodes), and consolidation efforts continue. Before and after consolidation, Microsoft employees enjoy large mailbox capacities, fast server response times, and messaging services that exceed the required high-availability level of 99.99 percent and frequently reach 99.999 percent with no extra effort.

Exchange Server 2007 enables Microsoft IT to not only lower storage costs and increase mailbox quotas, but also decrease storage complexities, regain full control over all aspects of the Mailbox server design (including the storage subsystem), eliminate maintenance overhead, and increase high availability of Mailbox servers. All storage-related issues that Microsoft IT encountered since the initial production rollout of Exchange Server 2007 were recoverable without the need for backups. There have been no critical storage-related incidents affecting Mailbox server availability across the entire corporate messaging environment for more than 18 months.

Get it while its still hot.